Benchwarmer

by Josh Wilker

  Once, when I was a kid, my father bought me a palm-sized plastic replica of the Mets version of this bullpen cart. My brother and I visited our father in New York for two weeks every summer. At our urging and against his revulsion for sports, he would always take us to a game at Shea. The day he bought me the bullpen cart I couldn’t take my eyes off of it, even when the game was still going on. I don’t remember anything about the game, but I remember riding the subway back to my father’s apartment after the game, rolling the little plastic baseball-headed bullpen cart up and down my lap, carefully, gently. Of all the souvenirs that ever passed through my hands, it was my favorite.

  In my father’s apartment we all slept on the floor, my brother and me side by side, perpendicular to our father, our feet nearly touching his legs. I held the bullpen cart in my hands. From those few nights every year as a child I developed a lifelong response to being in a high rise and hearing the sound of nighttime city traffic below: it always makes me feel safe.

  When I think about my vanished souvenir, the little plastic version of the Mets bullpen cart, my fingers tingle, feeling its absence. It’s not a bad feeling, exactly. It’s like the feeling I get all over my body when I’m lucky enough to be at some sparsely attended sporting event with two teams playing out the string and the game starts to feel like it will last forever. In the bottom of the thirteenth inning at Wrigley, as my whole body was faintly tingling, Aramis Ramírez singled off Ramón Ramírez, the twentieth pitcher to enter the game. Matt Murton came to the plate next and began working the count in his favor. It seemed like things might be moving toward a conclusion. The sparse gathering roused from near-silence to the outer limits of its capabilities: murmuring. Then there was a burst of shouting behind me, something that ended with these words:

  “You’ll never play baseball again!”

  I thought at first it was the kind of drunken barking loosed at ballgames in a jocular pantomime of rage. Then a wiry man, bristling with anger, stalked past me down the steps of the aisle and grabbed the shoulder of a blond teenaged boy sitting three rows in front of me, by himself, like me, a fan who’d moved down close and didn’t want to leave. The kid was wearing an Aramis Ramírez jersey.

  “You hear me? You’ll never play baseball again!” the man shouted. “Now get in the car!” The kid just sat there, staring at the game. The man hit him hard in the face with an open right hand.

  I stared at Matt Murton in the batter’s box.

  “Get in the car!” the man barked again. “We’ve been waiting in the car for an hour! You think the whole world revolves around you? Get in the goddamn car! I’ve got kids that need to get to bed.”

  The man drew closer.

  “We’ll leave you in the city,” he hissed into his kid’s ear. Then, using his hitting hand to give the kid’s jerseyed shoulder a shove, the man straightened up and away from the kid.

  In the batter’s box Matt Murton took another pitch. An Aramis Ramírez jersey crossed my vision. The kid and the man who’d hit him were moving up the aisle past me, the man with a tight grip on the kid’s arm. After they passed by, I heard one last thing.

  “Don’t think I won’t break your fucking shoulder.”

  Matt Murton trotted to first with a walk, but then Jacque Jones stranded the would-be winning run, Aramis Ramírez, at second. On to another inning. I went down below the stands and called my wife from a pay phone to tell her the game was still going, that it might go forever, but of course it didn’t, nor did I even believe it would, but I wanted it to, I still wanted it to, so when the Rockies took a two-run lead in the top of the fourteenth inning and the Cubs got a man on in the bottom of the fourteenth inning and sent Carlos Zambrano to the plate to pinch hit with two outs, and he lifted a fly ball to rightfield and the rightfielder Brad Hawpe, while setting himself for what looked like it was going to be an easy catch, skidded slightly on the wet grass, I prayed for him to fall, for the ball to elude him, for both the lead runner and Carlos Zambrano to circle the bases, for the score to be healed back into a tie, for nothing to be decided, for nothing to be eliminated, for the bullpen carts of yore to reappear again and again through the mist, for the parade of morose relievers evermore.

  Pulling a John Anderson

  Now a defunct term anywhere outside the context of baseball history chatter, “pulling a John Anderson” was in broad public usage for some time in the early part of the twentieth century. John Anderson was a baseball player who was thought to have attempted to steal a base that a teammate occupied. Recent historians have discovered that this version of the play was a distortion. John Stahl’s biography of John Anderson on the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) website locates the birth of the term in a late-season game in 1903. With one out in the eighth inning of a game that Anderson’s team, the St. Louis Browns, trailed 6–0, Anderson drew a walk to load the bases. The next batter, Bobby Wallace, worked the count full. Baserunners will often break with the pitch when the count on a batter is full, not looking to steal the base but to better advance on a batted ball. But Wallace, who struck out just twenty-eight times that year, swung and missed at strike three as Anderson was expanding his lead. The opposing catcher whipped a throw behind Anderson to first, and Anderson was tagged out for an inning-ending double play.

  It’s difficult to trace why this pickoff play, the product of some bad luck coupled with assertive but not particularly unusual baserunning, would have led to the idea that John Anderson had gamboled idiotically all the way to second base before finding it occupied. Perhaps he was caught so far off of first that firsthand observers of the play felt the impulse to mock him for something, and adding moronic obliviousness as the core cause of the failure was an outcome of this impulse. Perhaps also a small incident was turned into a big one by an elaborate game of telephone, an easy feat in the early days of baseball media, when the only concrete record of the game back then would have been a newspaper box score that showed Anderson as “caught stealing” with the bases loaded.

  However it came into being, the notion of “pulling a John Anderson” caught the public’s imagination. Perhaps this is because it spoke to a core societal anxiety: the fear of wanting something you can’t have, shouldn’t have, but try to take anyway. Sometimes I think about the term Pulling a John Anderson when I’m watching Abby breastfeed my son.

  I remember a long ago morning in my apartment in Brooklyn, years before Jack was born. Abby had stayed over the night before. She had either just gotten out of bed or out of the shower, and she was naked. She was cold, and to warm herself up she came over and sat on my lap and put her arms around me. All your dreams will come true! Yes, all your dreams will come true, and then life will go on. For so long I ached to have a girl run to me, and I didn’t even require that she be naked when it happened, though I had plenty of dreams about that, and the dreams were so profoundly opposed to my day-to-day reality as to be as unattainable as any thought I had to playing major league baseball, and yet, eventually, a woman, and not just any woman but one I loved and was in love with, ran to me naked and threw her arms around me.

  That moment! I brought it up more than once afterward. Abby tried to explain to me that she was just cold, but I refused to downgrade the moment from my initial perception, which had something to do with the softness of the touch, the tenderness, the need, the sheer fact that a naked woman was on my lap. We’d had sex before that point and probably had even had sex as recently as the night before, so it wasn’t about sex as much as it was about love, closeness, and the coming true of my deepest dreams. In my deepest dreams not only would the woman running to me want me but would love me and know me and I’d love and know her.

  “I was just cold,” Abby insisted, tiring of my nostalgia. Eventually this explanation dropped away and I just got eye rolls. Now I keep my nostalgia to myself, and really it’s not even nostalgia: it happened so long ago as if to be something that happened to someone el
se, like something I read in a book.

  But it does still exist in my flesh. I mean I can feel it, not always, but it’s there. Recently I had a dream that haunted me all throughout the following day, the kind of dream that hits the senses in such a way that they buzz with the aftermath of the contact long into the waking hours. In the dreams my wife was soft and tender with me again. It had been a long time. It diminishes, this tenderness. How could it not? There’s no room for it. Mothers of young children talk about the phenomenon of being “touched out.” All day long they have this little being that needs to be touched and cared for every moment. Eventually, against every instinct and emotion that tends toward wanting to fulfill this need, the mother reaches a point where she just feels exhausted by the demands, exhausted by always having to bestow tenderness, the presence needed for this. And then a grown man, large and bristly with unshaven whiskers and bad breath and hair sprouting everywhere and a face turning ever more severe and unpleasant with age, ugly, loud, unappealing, a grown man comes to you with a suffocating desire to be touched.

  That’s what I wanted, what was missing. It wasn’t about sex, not in the usual sense. Who’s going to run to me, touch me? Those days are long gone, and with the arrival of a new recipient of all my wife’s touching, that absence has become official, permanent, and in the face of that permanence I’m receding into my ninth-grade self, praying to Pawtucket, daydreaming for hours on end about being named, about reaching first base, a kiss, and then setting out in a sprint to second base. It seemed entirely fitting back then that that’s how my new world of desire was set out, as an advancement around the bases. I wasn’t entirely sure what third base meant, and home plate was terrifying. But second base was clear and beautiful and everything I wanted. Back then the mere thought of any of the words for what second base represented—tits, boobs, rack, gazongas—was enough to give me a raging erection. In those days all I had were words, as any actual gazongas might as well have been as remote as the moon. Now, in my second pubescence, second base was much closer but was occupied. How beautiful this occupation. In my right mind it’s everything, the center of the universe, my wife feeding my son with herself, and it’s a blessing to be able to support and protect that. But fatherhood has rarely found me in my right mind. More often than not, I’m wanting.

  “What are you thinking about?” Abby asked me one day. I was sitting on the couch and she was in the recliner, feeding Jack.

  “What do you mean? Nothing,” I said.

  “Your face,” she said. She performed an imitation of a mouth-breathing dullard. I felt like how anyone feels when they’re interrupted while lost in unwholesome cogitation. Like drifting too far off base, getting picked off. I couldn’t have put what I was thinking about into words anyway, short of reciting the entirety of a clammy encyclopedia containing every synonym for tits.

  “I’m just sitting here,” I said.

  Q

  Quitter

  Sometimes I wasn’t the last one on the Late Bus. There was one family that lived even farther away from everything. I always felt better when one of them was on the bus with me because it meant I wouldn’t be the reason Mr. Race had to drive beyond his own house. I was sort of friends with one of them, Denny, because our shared rural obscurity meant that sometimes, such as when the Late Bus had expelled all its passengers but the two of us, I was the only option in the way of an audience if he felt like talking to someone. Often he talked about how much loathing there was between him and the bus driver, Mr. Race. “He hates going past his house for us,” Denny said. He was hunched low in his seat and murmuring, as if we were prisoners plotting to shiv a guard. “But fuck him.”

  Other times he talked about the future, how he’d return to our town a multimillionaire and impose his will on all the adults who had slighted him or his family, chiefly the bus driver but also the varsity basketball coach and others. I was always impressed with his conception of the future, simply in that he was able to conceive of it with any specificity at all. The future to me was a blank. I was impressed by Denny’s past too. He went to parties and had friends. Things had happened to him.

  “Carol Ann,” he said to me during one Late Bus ride. “We were camping, a bunch of us, and there was a campfire, and we were all getting fucked up.”

  “Drinking?” I said.

  “Carol Ann was next to me,” Denny said, “and that’s all I remember, and then I came to, you know. I mean I just kinda woke up and we were frenching.”

  “Wow,” I said. I knew the girl he was talking about. She was so pretty it hurt.

  “Didn’t remember anything, because of rum, just bam,” Denny said. “I keep hoping it happens again, that I blank out and get back there to her.”

  “Yeah,” I said, and from then on I hoped for the very same thing, that I’d slip the pain and tedium and disappointment of the present and the burdened blank of the future by conking out somehow and waking up later in the middle of impossible bliss. Sometimes I even skipped the fantasy of coming to while kissing Carol Ann or whoever and instead just hoped for any kind of leaping advancement through time. I wanted to shed the looming feeling of everything that was still in front of me, wanted above all to shed virginity, but I didn’t want to have to live through all the unfathomable, humiliating steps it would take to accomplish this. I just wanted it to have been done and to be an adult, with everything that hurt behind me.

  This dream came back to me with a vengeance in fatherhood. I knew as I engaged in the fantasy that I would someday look back on it with deep regret, knowing that I’d wasted a portion of my slim pocket of time with my boy as a tiny sweet baby wishing it away. And yet again and again I wished for just that, for it all to be done so that I could be beyond it, beyond all risk and blame, beyond all tedium and exhaustion, beyond the sadness of knowing that somehow my own chronic sadness was going to filter down into my innocent son, beyond all that, resting, thinking back on anesthetized memories. Fortifying this wish for extended blackout was a growing belief that it might be possible. I kept having a certain experience that supported these fantasies. I kept losing time.

  For many years I imagined my life as an unbroken line through time, A to B to C and so on, with a starting point on the left and an arrow on the right and an orderly list of Important Moments in between. It’s a popular notion, that life is orderly, that there’s a start and then an arrow leading somewhere, preferably away from failure and toward success. I kept reaching for this fiction even after, with Jack’s arrival, it was clear that it had been obliterated. It became evident fairly early on in fatherhood that my life was no longer a continuous narrative but a series of brief, disoriented departures from an abiding existential brownout.

  In the first few weeks after Jack’s birth I would find myself in places with only a vague sense of where I was or how I’d gotten there. Maybe it’s like this for a boxer in the middle of a losing fight. The bell rings to pull the boxer a little closer to full consciousness, enough to start a habitual movement to the center of the ring but not enough to bring back any sense of clarity or competence. I would find myself in a supermarket, for example, moving down an aisle, my hands on an empty cart, a broken wheel making it veer to the left. I wouldn’t remember driving to the supermarket and wouldn’t know why I was there. I’d dig into my pockets for a list and pull out a jingly cloth giraffe.

  You will have fog in your head and toys in your pockets. That’s how it’ll be for a while, and the fog will lessen over time but never altogether dissipate. Sometime in April, when Jack was about eight and a half months old, I came to yet again, the first time in a while. I was in a supermarket parking lot, behind the wheel of our car. I reached into my coat pocket for a list and pulled out one tiny blue sock. This brought me back into my life. I remembered that I was heading home, that I’d see Jack, that I’d be able to show him his sock. I remembered that I’d been at work but had left early. There had been an Office Olym
pics that I tried to attend, but after about twenty seconds of standing mutely at the edge of a crowd of my coworkers in a large conference room, most coworkers standing around chatting while a few coworkers prepared to compete in a series of zany office-related competitions, I had to bolt. I went back to my cube, and, imagining the questions I’d have to field about why I hadn’t been at the Office Olympics, I wrote an e-mail to the coworkers in my immediate group explaining that I needed to cut out early, unexpectedly. I used my child as an excuse. You will use your child as an excuse. I had to do it. Some people can stand around chatting with one another in rooms; I was becoming more and more unable to be one of those people. On the way home I’d stopped in a grocery store parking lot because I suddenly had a small piece of unaccountable time. I had freed myself, albeit dubiously, from work, and I wasn’t expected home for an hour. So I parked at the far edge of the lot, turned off the car, and fell unconscious. It was a short, useless sleep, except for the feeling for a split second upon waking. I didn’t know where I was or who I was. This is the off-ramp I’m always dreaming of. You will dream of leaving everything behind. You will want to quit.

  What makes you want to quit is not easily definable. You are like Roberto Duran in the fight that diminished his legend, when Sugar Ray Leonard danced and juked and mocked and vanished, again and again and again, never allowing Duran to engage.

  “Duran is completely bewildered,” Howard Cosell reported from ringside.

  “No mas,” Duran finally said. No more.

  You’re not getting struck with blows of any measurable force but instead are being tapped incessantly, a tap here, a tap there, and each time when you move to respond, to make the tapping cease, you miss. There’s some kind of mockery in the air, a Technicolor loopiness strewn, as if you’re stumbling around in a room full of floppy giraffes, tiny blue socks, blocks, battery-embedded toys all cackling out nursery rhymes and ABC songs, mockingly orderly ditties, your every move lampooned, skewered, you the buffoon in an ongoing absurdity, blundering errands, hectored, unmanned, trying merely to return to your corner, desiring some peace, hearing instead the incredulous bullfrog cadences of Cosell telling it like it is and then the bell, time to move again to the center of invisible forces. You will want no more.