by Lucas Mann
“That’s a man,” he tells me, nodding as though I should make note of this on a bar napkin, put it in my wallet as a reminder of what to aspire to. As though that commendation for living correctly, for being the kind of person people automatically like, could be enough.
· · ·
The casinos are supposed to cater to the tourists. There are seventeen casinos in Iowa, so there must be seventeen casinos’ worth of people flooding this flat and landlocked rectangle for their yearly vacations, ready to pour money into the state in return for the endless excitement supplied through hands of digital three-card poker. It is easy to wonder in Burlington and in Clinton: Where exactly are all the tourists? This snarky tone is easy, too, especially for me, someone who lives outside a casino town. I know Joyce noticed it when I spoke to her about her job as a blackjack dealer, and she said adamantly, “I work for good people. I work for people who give back.”
But that is always the question in a relationship, always what is at stake. How much is being given back by the entity that is huge, that controls everything and will always win? How much does it mean that the Wild Rose gave a few grand, or one man’s losing streak, to the Clinton Red Cross? That’s not fair. I’ve been told that the Wild Rose has given back a million dollars in one way or another to Clinton. It’s helping fund the Sawmill Museum, an homage to the greatest part of Clinton’s history, and that must mean something.
There are pictures around the Pzazz! FunCity of the usual things, a blond woman with red lips in a low-cut sweater, throwing gold coins over her head after an apparently easy slot win. That blond, red-lipped, cleavaged woman took something back from the casino, we are told. She won. We could, too, after our meal. There are so many places we could win. The Pzazz! and its Catfish Bend Casino may be billed as utterly unique, but there is another Catfish Bend in Fort Madison. And Jumer’s of Quad Cities, “Vegas without the airfare” in the local TV ads, is just like the other ones that the Delaware North Companies own in Arkansas and Arizona and New York and Florida and Oklahoma. And Joyce’s Wild Rose is not the only Wild Rose that has grown in Iowa, a fertile ground for such plants, what with the tax breaks extended to welcome them.
John Tamargo will gamble tonight, I know that as we talk. Why not? He will light his cigar and stand over the craps table, trying not to think of an offense that can’t seem to score more than two runs in a game, a season in which wins don’t come in pairs, let alone groups. He and his players and Dwight will be those tourists whom the casino attracts. But they will likely be the only out-of-town big fish, no matter how questionable their bigness. These Iowa casinos aren’t really made to be flooded with visitors. That’s not where they make their money. The majority of the clientele in a casino like this one will drive home tonight and then back the next day, not here for an occasion, but to feed a compulsion, drawn to this biggest, shiniest neighbor that offers a chance for immediate and repeatable victory. Joyce is working at the Wild Rose tonight, dealing blackjack to the same people whom she has dealt blackjack to for nearly as long as Hank Contreras has been alive. That’s the only reason she didn’t make the two-hour trip to Burlington tonight. She will be busy until 2:00 a.m., until the last of her neighbors is told to leave.
John Tamargo has ordered another double Johnnie Walker Black, and when the waitress asked for payment, he pointed at me. He is happy that I will pay and that I will listen. He is happy that I am scared of him, the kind of fear that makes me want to stay, not leave.
We talk about his players, but he will not say which ones we’re talking about by name. We discuss types, and it feels appropriate because it’s so easy to see the players that way, all the same from a distance, no name above the numbers on their jerseys, defined by how much playing time they get and what happens in those innings.
The ones who are supposed to be succeeding are doing what they’re supposed to do. That means that Nick Franklin is off to a hot start. The organization is pleased.
Some of these guys need to learn that life ain’t a goddamn handout, but that’s all right, they’ll learn, everybody does, they’ll be just fine. That means he doesn’t like players who complain because he feels that, in his day, complaining did not exist.
And then, as nonchalant as all the previous statements, Some of these guys, most of these guys, will never make it past here. Talent is talent. You can’t tell them that; it’s something that they’ve got to realize on their own.
We are silent together after that one.
He pushes ice with his straw and says, finally, “Good whiskey.”
I think of the sign in the hallway with the winner on it, her red lips and cleavage freckles.
“That’s kind of sad, isn’t it?” I say.
And those words linger as well, embarrassing me the moment I release them. They are soft words, and also pointless. What does sadness have to do with the reality of things? Tamargo keeps his eyes on the ice and the straw.
“What?” he says. “Oh yeah. Yes, it’s sad, I guess. Yes.”
His brow is furrowed, reliving tonight’s game still, first thoughtful and then increasingly upset. He leans forward toward me.
“Listen, when I was twenty-one, I didn’t give a shit, because I knew I was good,” he says. “That’s the way it’s got to be. You see a guy who doesn’t believe he’s the best fucking hitter in the building, well, then he isn’t going to be shit. I don’t have to tell you the names. You see these guys. You see the ones who are the real deal, they know it. They wake up every day and look in the mirror and say, ‘I’m the shit.’ I was the shit and I knew it, so I made it.”
It is the longest, loudest burst of speech he has given me since I met him, and he leans back against the sticky plastic of the booth, smiling, remembering. His fists are balled on the table, and his ring, engraved with the record of a championship won miles and decades away from here, absorbs all the dim light. He is describing a version of himself that was more than half a life ago but is still vivid, when he tore through A-ball after being a sixth-round pick and ended his second year in the minors in AA, his third in AAA, the exact sequential order that life is supposed to take for the guys who progress the right way. And why should he be soft and sympathetic toward his players who are stuck in A-ball because they can’t adjust, who mope around hoping for things to change, muttering that they’re getting cheated, when if they were man enough, they would have just done what they had to do the way he did? Most of the time, he is sympathetic. He is good to them on the field, in the clubhouse, when they sulk after games like the kids they are. It is a frustrating job.
“When I played, if you didn’t move up, you were gone,” he says. “You couldn’t hit a pitch, shit, you better learn how.”
And then, just as fast as he inflated, he returns to a soft grumble, to fat, liver-spotted hands unclenched and resting on a table that keeps pissing him off because it still hasn’t been wiped down and how fucking hard is it to wipe a table if that’s your job?
“Look, I was a 4A player,” he says.
“They had Quadruple-A ball then?” I ask and realize, as soon as the words are out, what he means. He looks at me, and I notice for the first time that his eyes are a pale green, beautiful in an entirely unexpected way.
“No,” he says quietly. “There never was a 4A, just 4A players. Four-A talent isn’t enough. You’re good enough to get there, and then you look around and notice that you ain’t near good enough to stay. That’s 4A. The point is you gotta realize what you are.”
Quiet again. His straw and his ice again. My breathing.
“Some of these guys,” he continues, gesturing at the booths around us, now almost entirely empty of players because the players hardly ever drink as often or as long as their coaches do. “Some of these guys, you know that they realize who they are. They’re just waiting around for someone to tell them. And so soon someone will.”
It’s not as if this should be a surprise, this type of man or these words. There is loss to it all, a sensibi
lity that makes for a stoic symphony, a man coming to terms with limits. The way I learned it and imagined it, there was some lovely honor to the solidarity of men pushing themselves as far as they could go, knowing it wasn’t far enough, but leaving some mark with the effort. And now, again, I am back in my father’s John R. Tunis books, The Kid from Tomkinsville, Dave the catcher in that book, old and stooped and smart and persevering and resigned. How do I remember that all so well? And one scene in particular: the young protagonist, the Kid, who has just won the pennant for his team, refusing to smile, refusing to celebrate, watching Dave, the old one, pulling off his jersey for the last time because things have finally run out for him. I remember that the shirt is wet and worn. I remember that Tunis wrote of the lines on his face, and I thought of a knife carving into stone and I wanted to be stone. I remember that the sentence beginning the next chapter was something like “The Kid missed him so bad.” So bad. And my father’s body next to mine as he read, the certainty of it being there, the words coming from his mouth that meant that things resonate even after they end.
But across the table from John Tamargo, who is real, even though he is all those tropes, grizzled and weary, a catcher, all I can do is wonder why he is here, fifty-eight years old and increasingly drunk at the Pzazz! FunCity, making less a year, probably, than the manager of the Boogaloo Cafe and talking to me over a still-unwiped table, the waitress coming over to say that her shift is ending, if we want to keep it up, we need to sit at the bar.
He has a wife at home, he tells me. She is the same woman who married him when they were nineteen and bore him his first child when they were twenty-one and he was on the road someplace a lot like Burlington, Iowa. They have never been together for more than six months out of a year, and that is the only way they know how to love each other, the way their children were raised. John Tamargo Sr. begat John Tamargo Jr. this way, and John Tamargo Jr. made it to AAA and stalled out, never got the four home runs that his father did in major-league ballparks. He is coaching in the Midwest League now, too, and in a couple of months he’ll be made interim manager of the Lansing Lugnuts, and he will lead his team to a win against his father, and a human interest article will run on MiLB.com calling John Tamargo Sr. a proud papa and quoting him saying that his son has been around baseball his whole life, knows nothing else. That he could make a pretty good manager someday.
John Tamargo Sr. is not done with this night, so I follow him to the bar. The Boogaloo Cafe is almost empty. Two blond men who look like brothers are laughing and shoving each other at one end of the bar. They are the only people here, aside from Phil Plantier, a former rising star with the Red Sox and, thus, one of the first athletes I remember having the power to make me, a five-year-old Yankees fan, hate him. The sight of him leaves me feeling starstruck and far drunker than I’d previously been. His major-league career ended quickly. He’s a roving hitting instructor with the Mariners now, staying a few weeks in each minor-league town. He is spitting tobacco into an empty Corona bottle, trickles of brownish-green spit settling in his chapped lips. I don’t want to see that.
Tamargo extends his hand to Plantier’s still-formidable right shoulder and presents him to me with pride.
“This,” he says, “is my friend Phil Plantier. Hundred home runs in the bigs.”
“Ninety-one,” Phil Plantier says and spits.
· · ·
The maddening thing with Hank is that it’s impossible to say that his talent has run out or that he played himself out of the lineup. When he plays, he hits. And when he runs the bases, he is slow but determined, always getting dirty in that way that baseball celebrates above all else, always clapping his callused hands together when he stands on base and yelling, “Sí, sí, sí,” so that his teammates, the fans who hardly recognize him, and even Tamargo on the bench smile. None of that matters.
He is lauded for being workmanlike, uncomplicated on the field. He plays according to the blunt maxims that Tamargo has been preaching all year. On a whiteboard, near the entrance to the locker room, is written, “JT’s words of wisdom.” The wisdom hasn’t changed since the first game, because it’s not being listened to.
“It ain’t that complicated,” the board still says. “See a fastball and swing the fucking bat.”
Many fastballs have been seen, and many bats have been infuriatingly inert, to the point where even the drunkest, most casual of LumberKings fans have begun to make the connection that when a ball is pitched straight and fast and hits the catcher’s mitt for a called strike, chances are Tamargo, in plain sight coaching third, will roll his eyes, slam his palms together, and mutter obscenities while waddling circles on the grass like some enraged, hypermasculine Charlie Chaplin. And then Hank, in the three games so far that he’s played, gets up and hacks at the first pitch he sees, a vicious, flat line drive swing. And when he gets a hit, it’s nice, it’s extra. It’s a surprise, even though it shouldn’t be.
Potential is a seductive thing, and in the minors it can seem like the only thing. All of this here is geared toward the future. The present only matters in what it can promise for other teams, other places, and there are reminders of that fact that every fan wants to ignore, written into each game’s lineup. James Jones, the fourth-round-pick outfielder who likes to put on a fifty-pound weighted vest before doing pull-ups, can be hitting .213, but when he connects, oh, man, everyone sees what could be. This dynamic is even more obvious with Steve Baron, that near millionaire. His team-worst batting average is inconsequential compared with his young, fast-twitching body that hasn’t even filled out yet. In batting practice, Baron will be frustrated for rounds until one ball leaves his bat the right way, a smooth, rising line drive that somehow crashes off the right-field wall when it looked as if he didn’t even swing that hard, and the coaches will all glance at each other, eyebrows up, thinking ahead.
I leaned on the batting cage and watched Hank take his swings before today’s game. For him, it was the game; these would be his only swings of the day. Hank kept his knees slightly bent, bat slightly raised, ready. He produced grounders that hissed over third, low line drives that two-hopped the wall in left. I found myself clapping my hands together when he hit what might have been a double in a game that mattered, happy to see it and then instantly embarrassed about such a show of favoritism, such a reminder to all that I was there. But I wasn’t the only one. His teammates called out to him. “Vamos, Hanky” from the Venezuelans, “Hanky Panky” from the Americans. Terry Pollreisz, the hitting coach who is the gentlest, most paternal of the staff, entered his own “Attaboy, Hankster” to the chorus.
He is the one who’s easiest to root for, maybe because the expectations are low or because he isn’t a threat to the careers that his teammates feel promised. Watching his swing, his good but not seismic line drives, I let myself fall into absurd thoughts about how, with a little more hard work, I could totally have been a pro ballplayer. Which is so insulting and delusional. There is no room for personal fantasy when I see a ball leap off Nick Franklin’s bat and clear the high wooden wall in center by fifteen feet.
“Coming out,” Hank said before his last swing of the day. He got an easy pitch and he swung up, unloading on the ball. The field erupted in “Ooooohs,” which always happens when a hitter really tags one, as though everyone were worried about the abuse that poor ball just took. Mine and Hank’s and thirty-odd other heads followed the ball, arcing high toward scattered clouds, its stitches still barely visible. Hank took a couple of steps down the first-base line and craned his neck forward as if that could have some effect.
The ball hit off the bottom of the fence in left center, rolled for a moment, and stopped. Tamargo called out, “Little man hit it,” one of his standard punch lines any time a player comes up just short of a home run, but the words felt more loaded right then. Everyone still laughed.
· · ·
Phil Plantier is displeased, sitting at the bar of the Boogaloo Cafe, and his ire returns Tamargo to the mood
he’d been in immediately after today’s loss.
“I’m so goddamn frustrated,” Plantier says. “It’s so goddamn pathetic.”
“Well, shit,” Tamargo says.
They both swig whiskey.
My drunkenness becomes acute and unavoidable when balancing on a bar stool and remembering Phil Plantier’s name at the same time proves difficult.
“Mr. Liambeer,” I say and then realize that Bill Laimbeer is a former Detroit Piston’s basketball player and is not anywhere near Pzazz! FunCity tonight. “I mean, Mr. Plantier. What’s frustrating?”
“Who the fuck is this?” Plantier says, and Tamargo tells him again. It doesn’t improve his mood. He glares at me and spits again.
“What’s frustrating?” he says. “We go find and overpay these children who can’t put the bat on the ball. That’s fucking frustrating.”
He looks past me to Tamargo and continues. “I mean, you see it every fucking day with this guy. How do you deal with it? You tell him, ‘Hey, maybe don’t watch the first two pitches and then swing as hard as you can at a fucking curveball you can’t hit.’ He doesn’t listen. It’s not that hard.”
He’s talking about Sams, whose series of ugly swinging strikeouts was perhaps the most entertaining part of tonight’s game.
“Are you talking about Sams?” I ask.
“Mind your own fucking business,” Plantier says, and then, “What the fuck do you think?”
He and Tamargo fall into a conversation that feels so worn, so common for them that it’s almost rehearsed. I imagine it repeated, honed in a lot of bars like this one, drunken agreement, commiseration, Plantier glowering, nasty yet proud, at the strangers who stare at him because they know they’ve seen him somewhere but they’re not sure where. These two men have seen so much of the same thing. They are both still here. They don’t know how to do anything else, really, how to be any other kind of person. Tamargo will freely admit that with a mixture of pride and wistfulness. It is so obvious. What would their conversation be other than what is wrong with this modern game, these players who are not them, whose careers they now have to serve? They remember themselves suffering more, playing harder and better, earning it, unlike how these boys under their care never have to.