Class A

by Lucas Mann

  A stooped man with white wisps poking out under an unironic John Deere cap walks toward us, a round woman behind him. The man raises a half wave, and I think for a moment that he recognizes Erasmo, that he’s coming to pay respects. But he shuffles past to the table behind us, populated by women in dresses that look like wallpaper and their half-finished milk shakes.

  “Did you go to Clinton High, missus?”

  “Oh, a long time ago.”

  There are laughs.

  “Was it in ’55?”

  “Yes, it was.”

  The round woman steps up in front of her husband.

  “I’m Janey’s sister.”

  “Helen?”

  A nod.

  “Little Helen?”

  There are noises that are happy and sad at the same time, trebly exclamations of what a small world it is, what a condensed but beautiful rush of time a life is. Erasmo and I watch.

  “I knew that was you,” as though she’d been searching forever and had a feeling just this morning that she was almost there. The faces haven’t changed that much, it is decided. Amazing, isn’t it? Wrinkles like fingertips after a bath, a little sag, but once you really know a face, you know it forever. It’s a continuity that Erasmo gave up on at fourteen, when he first left for a dorm room crowded with itinerant jocks, one that I have fled, too, here in this town alone, but with much more trepidation. I think of Betty’s words the first time we met: “Where is your mother?” I crave stagnancy sometimes. It’s a choice, the selection of satisfied consistency above all else, one that is increasingly impossible here as the town shrinks and there are fewer opportunities to justify staying, but I don’t want to see that. Kids leave now, if they can. They’re told to.

  Sometimes it feels important to try to get Erasmo to say that he’d like to stop for a little while, that he could be happy with some sort of settling. And for me, always so fascinated with those who are striving, worshipping them, pretending to live in emulation of them, it is tempting to change fascinations. To want a bland vanilla McDonald’s milk shake and a present life set on the exact same backdrop as my memories.

  “Can I be honest?” a Venezuelan journalist asks me in a restaurant in Caracas. “The major leagues, the Americans, sometimes I think they look at us, and by us I mean Latin Americans, as some sort of uneducated animals.”

  He is a pale man, this writer, doughy in a way that makes me feel solidarity. He is speaking to me in stylish English fashioned around a two-year stint in a digital journalism master’s program in London. He is part of a Venezuelan upper class that can obsess over and profit from baseball without ever playing at a high level, that can identify the game’s importance to the political, cultural, and national identity.

  “Baseball is part of our spirit; it is who we are,” he says, and he slams the table. Soup sloshes. “Nobody feels the spirit of the game like a Latin player, and they treat us like we know nothing.”

  “Yes,” I agree. “I love that spirit.” Or something awful like that.

  It is a passion I have seen in every opulent place in Venezuela: the country club where the dentist who spends all his free time as a sports radio host told me of his plans to become a scout; the thirty-million-dollar Polar Beer baseball complex where the locally famous agent showed me his portfolio, pictures of young men with dollar amounts written next to them, saying that he’s finding and making national heroes; the privately funded Venezuelan Baseball Hall of Fame on the second floor of a deluxe shopping mall, where pale historians tell me the narrative of the game; and now here in the only part of the capital where you can walk alone at night.

  But I’ve never heard the grandiose talk from players themselves. And again, differentiation becomes nearly impossible. Boys become men become bodies. One of the most successful agents in Latin America told me while watching middle schoolers scrimmage under a Firestone tires sign that he planned to set up his new scouting office in the rural province of Oriente. When I asked “Why? Who have you seen there?” he said, “No one in particular, I just like how black they are. I like how black bodies project.”

  The Chicago White Sox manager, Ozzie Guillen, got in trouble while I was in Clinton for saying that Asian players are pampered through the American baseball system compared with their Latin American counterparts, given translators at all levels, not just clubhouse Rosetta Stone lessons. But he was right, I say to this reporter, who replies, “Sí, sí, Oswaldo speaks the truth.” Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, they are relatively stable economies, and Japan’s own professional league can make a player a millionaire at home. They don’t have to be feeders into the promise of American ball.

  Venezuela has been an oil country for a century, and so baseball came with American drillers and foremen, who taught the game to laborers. In Nicaragua, a country too small and too poor to ever produce a truly famous athlete, soccer reigns supreme, but more and more, like in all of Central America, baseball scouts will show up on small, dirt fields, and word will get around, and boys like Erasmo Ramírez will come to try to earn the chance to leave and go somewhere they can’t quite define. Or maybe that’s too simple. It’s true, yes, the desperation to leave. But does that take away the possibility for Erasmo to be a kid who plays and loves what he plays? It is too blindly cheerful to say, Aw, he’s so happy to be here, but just as pointless and narrow-minded to paint him a victim when, so far, he’s winning.

  · · ·

  Erasmo tells me, in monotone, of the years and the travels that led him into a Sunday afternoon, post-church crowd at a Clinton, Iowa, McDonald’s. He has already told me because I always ask, and now I have asked again, hoping for more.

  “Yes, it was my mother; she took me to the tryouts.”

  “She must be an amazing woman.”

  “I like her. She works hard.”

  “And she wanted the best for you.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  They rode a bus four hours to a field in Managua, the capital, not saying much, because he was nervous and so was she. He was twelve then, and small. He didn’t look like anything special or feel like anything special, and while there was some surprise at the power coming from this tiny boy, he was told no, and he and his mother rode back home that night, the mountains closing in through the dark.

  I ask if she told him it was all right then, on the bus, told him it didn’t matter.

  “She told me try again,” he says.

  And he did. He went home to a house that he describes as fine, in a town, Rivas, that he describes as beautiful and then describes as poor, before settling again on fine. He threw a baseball every day, and he also threw the javelin, a sport he loved and dropped quickly because what chance is there to make money, make a life, on Junior Olympics javelin glory? He threw until he was thirteen and only a little bit bigger, and his mother found out, somehow, that a man was back in the capital looking for talent.

  “Who?” I ask.

  “The man from Chicago,” he says.

  “That sounds like a Jimmy Stewart movie,” I say.

  “What?” he says.

  A girl who must still have a while to go in high school comes by, sweeping the floor. She is wearing black polyester pants that McDonald’s makes her wear. There is sweat in small circles staining the fabric behind her knees because it is hot and every time she crouches to wipe ketchup blobs, the fabric sticks to her.

  Erasmo eyes her and says, “Nice.” He raises his eyebrows until his eyes become even rounder, bites his lip, and nods, a cartoon image of what a man should look like when he fantasizes.

  “She’s young,” I say.

  “Nah,” he says.

  This persona is still in its infancy for Erasmo. This girl, so young that she doesn’t even notice his eyes or hear the gravel of our voices, would be someone Erasmo might whistle at in stadium parking lots, never loud enough for her to hear, one who his roommates would then chide him for coveting, not up to their practiced ogling standards. And when it’s just me and him and I try to
talk about missing home and being frightened and all that, he just wants to go back to practice, or, failing that, wants to see if I’ll accept him as the kind of man who understands the pleasure of young asses stuck to McDonald’s-issue polyester blend.

  I make sure not to mention my time in the stands with the local girls who come to games in Hooters T-shirts, slathered in lotions that make them gleam, smelling of liquor as they talk about Erasmo’s teammates using nicknames, giggling while suggesting an infatuated intimacy that makes me ache with something between jealousy and guilt. Because those girls, when I point to Erasmo standing squat and calm on the mound, say, “Oh, he’s a mystery,” or, “Oh, him,” or just shrug. I think about Erasmo and his middle-aged lover beneath him, her children’s toys scattered in the background. I wonder what she means to him. The life that he repeatedly tells me the scaffolding of, never the insides, seems to have no room for mischief or fucking or loving. Maybe there was a girl he held hands with, felt up on the sand of a beach in Rivas when he was twelve and last had time. Most of what I think I know about him is imagined.

  Our eyes follow her down the aisle of tables, past the high school reunion that is still going on, stopping to acknowledge that she is so-and-so’s daughter, to bow her head and blush as old hands reach out to poke her, tell her what a woman she is becoming. She disappears into the bowels of the kitchen, the sound of her footsteps lost in the hiss of fry.

  “What do you miss most?” I ask him in this pause.

  A shrug.

  “Your mother’s cooking?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your father?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does he look like you?”

  “With a mustache.”

  “Do they ever ask you if you want to come home?”

  Finally, he looks at me like I’m stupid, with real emotion.

  “No,” he says. “What does any of that matter? I am here, I am working. They are there, they are not.”

  Erasmo’s picture is on the metal wall of the cafeteria of the Agua Linda baseball complex in Aguirre, Venezuela. I am tired and nauseous from the way Ilich doesn’t slow for turns or stop drinking his coffee on bumpy mountain roads. Waiting for needed breakfast, I see Erasmo. His face is the last one on the wall, glued on hastily a few months ago. He is under Félix Hernández, to the right of Asdrúbal Cabrera. Each of those players is in Phoenix at this exact moment, preparing for an all-star game that will be watched in every household with a television in Venezuela. There are others, too, on the wall, ten in total, from bona fide global stars like Felix to guys who played one season in the majors, icons when they return to their hometowns but merely a blip of half memory to anyone else.

  “Las Estrellas de Agua Linda,” reads a banner running in cursive across the bottom of the wall. “Felix, Wladimir, Asdrúbal …” The list continues on through first names, ending with “y ahora … Erasmo Ramírez!”

  I imagine him when he returns to train in the summers. I imagine him after he has finished breakfast, looking at himself, pixilated but permanent. The players still here in the Venezuelan Summer League do not look at the wall as they eat their arepas, drink juice fresh squeezed by the staff of women from this little village, who live and work at the complex as some combination of maids and surrogate mothers. The players are reminded of what they could be during every day of their lives, so these pictures, taunting over each meal, are an unnecessary motivational tool.

  I can’t think of the wall as anything reaffirming. Erasmo, whose accolades are, so far, limited to Venezuelan League domination and an all-star selection in Class A, who has generated buzz ranging up to “Might be a pretty consistent middle reliever in the majors,” has already been enshrined here. In fact, none of the players other than Hernández and Cabrera have established a consistent position in the major leagues. The Mariners have rented out Agua Linda for nearly a decade, and this wall reads like the tail end of a fantasy draft.

  A couple of players can speak English, and they talk to me at meals, another American with a pad to write on, reporting about them and their talents somewhere in the most important country.

  “How is Erasmo?” a boy named Ricardo asks me at dinner.

  Ricardo was Erasmo’s roommate when Erasmo first arrived in Venezuela. He has thick blue braces that do not interact well with molten ham and cheese sandwiches. His body is the opposite of Erasmo’s, towering over me, so wiry that he seems elastic, but for all his lanky potential he is still in Venezuela and Erasmo is not. Sometimes they text each other.

  “He is doing good over there, right?” Ricardo asks. “He is a star?”

  “Yes.”

  “Traveling? In the nice hotels? All the girls?”

  “Yes.”

  “He tells me I’ll be there soon. He tells me I will love it. I know I will.”

  He holds up his phone, as though to prove that their interactions exist.

  “We talked all the time when he was here, man,” he says. “We didn’t get any sleep. We had so much to say, you know? It’s not always like that. Everybody here is here for themselves. We talk, yeah, but not really. Not like really listening.”

  Ricardo is charming. He has a quiet, rasping voice and a smile that make you want to protect him in a way that he doesn’t need. But there is a slickness to him also, born of a life of being charming and told so. He is, I gleaned in my first hour and a half at Agua Linda, the favorite of all the staff, and when he sneaks into the cafeteria after a bullpen session to steal extra coffee, he is met with adoring coos from the women who have already begun to prepare lunch for forty. Maybe that’s why, despite being a year older than Erasmo, he is in his fourth season in Aguirre, the last a boy is allowed before he ages out, finished at twenty-one. This is, of course, the speculation of someone who has never wanted anything as much as Ricardo seems to want to play baseball for a living. But he doesn’t display the need and focus so obvious in Erasmo, a blunt and forceful emotion that pushes him through every new place where he is a stranger and there is a baseball field.

  “I am lucky,” Ricardo says to me. “My father manages a liquor store. My mother tells me to go to school.”

  So Ricardo reads engineering books in Maracaibo in the fall because he can. And he reminds himself that he should continue to do so when another former teammate, one who didn’t get promoted like Erasmo, calls and says, I’m selling newspapers on the highway. This wasn’t the life that was supposed to happen.

  “The coaches don’t talk to us about it,” Ricardo says. “But I know.”

  “Does Erasmo give you advice?” I’m sure of his answer before he gives it.

  “Just to continue working.”

  Erasmo’s phone is buzzing in the McDonald’s, and he is smiling at the screen, a text from someone he likes, maybe loves, far away from here.

  “Do you miss home?” I ask. Again. There has to be some past worth romanticizing as much as it’s worth running from. I want to believe that I am filtering a character for him, not imposing one.

  “I want something else.”

  “Right now?”

  “Yeah. Pie, I like the apple pie.”

  He smiles, guilty.

  “I am so hungry. All the time, hungry.”

  I long ago finished my chocolate shake and small fries, and I have been watching Erasmo eat with a mixture of jealousy and awe. It doesn’t bother him as long as I don’t stop him. We talk about his parents a little. I know that at some point both of his parents worked in an office, a fact that he passed on to me with proud gravity. He said that he thought they were accountants, but when I said “Oh,” he said, “Well, maybe. They sat at desks.” Now, like many in the second-poorest country in the Americas, Erasmo’s parents pick up odd jobs where they can. They call. He calls them more because he has a new agent who gave him a BlackBerry and pays for the international minutes. Nobody in his immediate family has left Nicaragua, and they will not visit him here. They will join him in Seattle if he makes it there, no, when, h
e corrects himself, when. They might move into a big Seattle house together, in the style of big Seattle houses. He asks me if I’ve ever been to Seattle. I say no. He says it’s beautiful, says it’s the place a family would want to live. I ask him when he got to visit, and he says never.

  “Do you tell them about here?” I ask.

  “Yes.”

  “What do you tell them?”

  “That it’s like anywhere. Like home, kind of. Maybe the same size. And there’s water. A river, though, no ocean. Maybe I miss the ocean. I tell them it is safe and it is quiet. Safer than home. And quieter. They like that.”

  Erasmo had just turned fourteen when he went to El Salvador at the request of the man from Chicago. The man from Chicago seems to be a part-time scout. He was friends with the man from Miami, originally the man from El Salvador, who got a U.S. college scholarship and then got Salvadoran government funds to start FESA, an athletic academy that would give Central America new heroes to root for. The man from Chicago was looking for boys from Nicaragua. Most of the boys weren’t much to see. Most of them couldn’t break eighty miles per hour on a fastball. Erasmo and one other boy threw eighty-five, and that was the first number that really meant something for him. Eighty-five meant maybe worth it. The man from Chicago spoke to the short, chubby boy from Nicaragua and his short, chubby mother. He said that Erasmo was invited to live in El Salvador and play in El Salvador for free. Erasmo hugged his mother and kissed her. They didn’t discuss whether he would go. They took the bus home through the mountains, and when they got home, he packed.

  There are three boys from Curaçao on the VSL Mariners, and one from Aruba, places smaller even than Nicaragua. They are described to me by their coaches as raw, then as long shots. One was approached at sixteen after running sprints on the practice field of a Caribbean junior tournament. He went home and told his mother, and there was celebration, and then he packed up and left. His mother is visiting, and his little brother, too, in Mariners caps and shirts, and flip-flops, next to me in the meager stands. His mother waves a lot, and his little brother whines, tries to hide from the sun. They both wince when he fails, which he does often because he has just been turned into a switch-hitter and is still coltish and confused when swinging lefty.