sunken treasures

if they offered me a time machine, I’d go back…..oh yeh, I’d go back and if they said, “but you can’t return to the now, to the beautiful here and now,” i would go back anyway and walk that walk with her beside the shopping mall at night when all the stores were closed, the street lights like spotlights on us, and my emotions sizzling like never before and the moon in some kind of phase I’d never noticed before and the fireflies I swear I saw and didn’t need to say it to Jenny because she saw them too. And we slipped behind the Quicky mart, down by the river and it musta been the water or the lapping of waves or the brewers winning the night before with a Mike Caldwell complete game shutout reminding me that feeling complete was still possible and so I reached out and slipped my dangerous fingers into Jenny’s naked fingers and she responded like a fourth of July day parade and we marched in unison and I held her hand and felt myself melting and yeh, if they offered me a time machine, I’d go back, oh yeh, I’d go back and if they said you can’t return to the beautiful here and now, i’d go anyway and welcome the jean jacket Jenny offered me in my moment of doubt because I knew for the first time of my life that someone cared about the scar on my left cheek, that Jenny wondered about the story of that scar and no one had ever cared about me like that and so we talked about the Clash’s Sandinista album, the blues and pop and reggae and Joe Strummer’s lyrics in that album and we sang a few of the songs together – The Magnificent Seven and Junky Slip  and we sang them out loud and we didn’t know all the lyrics, but the late night August crickets didn’t seem to mind  and I never saw Jenny again after that night but she was all I ever needed to know about love as I snuck down into an imaginary schooner and then over to a made up cargo ship and underneath in the galley, under a sink dripping water to quench my thirst, to survive the cross Atlantic Mediterranean to Turkey and then maybe the Arabian to dreamy Saigon or Tokyo and to China and Japan and studying Buddhism and back to Candlestick park San Francisco to ponder the wind and meditating so many years and all that striving for enlightenment that never happened and all that progress that never happened either and the only thing that mattered to me was Jenny’s 14-year old eyes.

a baseball card i’m glad to have

This is my Mona Lisa, an escape card to take me to the mental space I want to be – absorbed, in this case, with the 1971 black border Topps Thurman Munson card, may he rest in peace. I love this card, the dust, the unknown – safe or out? the autograph, the facial expression of both runner and catcher. I could do without the all-star rookie trophy but even Mona Lisa probably has a flaw or two, especially if you prefer blondes.

stumbling into haiku

I like pretending that I once lived in a garage and one day my cousin Johnny came over to say hello and while he was there, I went to the grocery store across the street to use the bathroom and when I returned, I immediately noticed that my cousin Johnny had turned the radio on and set it to a specific AM station and suddenly paranoia hit me and I assumed he was sending me a message with the specific station but after he left, I listened awhile and then decided to leave the radio on and good thing I did because the sound of all those talk shows kept me company and it all felt like a benevolent conspiracy and one of the shows was about baseball and in the middle of talk about the birth of the boxscore, I pretended that my name was Leonardo and that I was old, 80 years old and smoked cigars and like that radio, the cigar kept me company, something for us both to burn away together, that slow grey snake ash to eventual smithereens of us all.

I had no family in this old man reverie or none that I knew of so day and night, collecting my pension from my days working at the rail yard, I remembered my imaginary younger brother and his mysterious disappearance, last seen a top a horse in southern Spain during Holy Week. I enjoyed the memory of his quick first step on the basketball court and knack for writing long epic poems about every day objects like the one he penned about the history of laundry, from washboards as a practical tool to it being a musical instrument and onward to a Maytag machine and its pinwheel of tumbling colors seen through the oval-shaped window.

But back to my garage room, I seldom sat still even when listening to that radio and smoking stogies. Instead, I paced and it was hot where I lived, hot and humid causing the yellow shag carpet to go brown with the trail of my footsteps. I had learned about pacing from a raggedy old Japanese book I once found outside the Salvation Army and lucky me, one of the cashiers inside was Japanese and he translated the title to me, something about an ancient form of Japanese meditation, this pacing, to tune oneself to the earth’s heartbeat, the planet breathing, the universe pulsating like a jellyfish.

This inspired all kinds of thoughts, but I knew from a Buddhist TV show I watched late at night, to not attach to my thoughts, good or bad, to just let them go like passing clouds, but one of these thoughts dropped anchor in my mind and wouldn’t budge so I followed it all the way to Spain and my younger brother and the horse and then back to North America and what a horse meant to cowboys and Native Americans….the horse, the horse, the horse is all I could think of as I paced north, south, east, and west and so my mind was soon made up, to do what a poetry friend of my brother had instructed – to make dreams so impossible that they come true and since there were no ordinance in the village prohibiting it, I took the Chatwick northbound to the Cremlin Farm, bought a horse and rode it home and then all around town and as expected, the neighbors and locals wanted to talk, to find out the horses name and could their son or daughter take a ride and I never turned anyone down and it wasn’t out of some karmic wish that I would be rewarded for my kindness, just a tribute to my brother and his disappearance.

And so there were horse riding days and they passed and days turned to weeks and then one nice horse riding day with soft, soothing breezes upsetting the humidity, I spotted an even older man, even older than me, a man I had never seen before wearing a Japanese Yomiurui Giants baseball jacket. I knew the emblem from videos I’d seen about the Japanese home run king Sadaharu Oh. The man put his arms out in front of him like a football referee indicating pass interference. I pulled gently on the reins and the horse stopped.

“What’s the name of your horse?”

“Haven’t picked one yet. I’m kind of waiting for the right moment.”

“Well, maybe this is that moment,” replied the man. “That’s a Noma horse you got right there, out of Japan, yes, bred in Japan and very endangered.”

“I had no idea,” I said.

“Well, now you do” and with that he winked, turned around, returned to where he came from, the horizon in the distance, like some sort of specter.

I knew right then and there that my horse would be called Nomo, so close to Noma in name and a reminder, of my brother’s favorite baseball player – Japanese born big league pitcher Hideo Nomo and his two no-hitters, one against the Colorado Rockies at hitter friendly Coors Field making it truly a no-hitter!!

I had read a few books about Japanese baseball, thanks to Robert Whiting, beginning with YOU GOTTA HAVE WA and more recently THE MEANING OF ICHIRO. And now with a horse named after Hideo Nomo, I read more and as is often the case with reading and research, new nuggets of info unfurled like Japanese haiku poet Masaoka Shiki liking/playing baseball as a kid, writing a textbook about baseball, creating words for specific baseball details. He referred to the game as yakyu or field-ball. He was inducted into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame in 2002. Shiki’s life was a tragic one filled with his own long lasting tuberculosis and an alcoholic father who died young.

And as the days passed, I thought about this Haiku expression, this three line burst of 5-7-5 syllables, 1-2-3 lines like 1-2-3 outs and I made a vow to write one, good or bad, after every baseball game I attended, whether it be a little league game or the major league ones at the closest stadium to my home and yes, I rode the horse and parked it outside the stadium at that first game and police men on horses shared a moment with Noma my horse and after that first game, I completed my vow at old County Stadium Milwaukee and wrote a haiku…

set to soar
27th out
smashed paper beer cup echo
bar open all night

the forever fever

There was spinning around on the playground wheel and then more around and around spinning and we were kids and I guess it was exciting because I was drawn to the wheel and it didn’t stop spinning until we no longer knew where we were, some sort of disorder rebellion against the order our parents imposed on us? the chores listed on the refrigerator? weekend boy scouts or baseball? but at some point, all the flags and varsity jackets and pom pom rah rah rah hooray our team, our country pride lost its luster and so we opted for the disorder and chaos of beer and weed and shooting pool break the balls at 35th and Villard while everyone else, god bless them all, the Fisher shortstop and Cherkauer debate team hero went off to university and the Shultz family built a construction crew empire and so the rest of us focused on nothing and thanks to the joyful drunk poet at the local Kremlet’s bowling ally bar….well, he seemed to know that we were all magic and the lucky ones amongst us believed him.

I knew the beautiful drunk poet as Damon, but none of us knew where he came from, just that there was once living in a county, a small one in Ireland or maybe Poland with no post office box number and he never mentioned the words Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but we knew he knew all our sufferings and all the details with one look at our naked hands in search of a place to hide. He was like some sort of older brother shaman before we ever knew what a shaman was and I haven’t talked to my friends from way back then in a long time but I suspect I’m still searching for a shaman and I know more than ever that I don’t need to travel to the Amazon forest to find one. There’s one right here, right now, just around the corner, in the local tavern, if I would just walk into that strange jukebox land and know once again that we are all human in pursuit of joy and thank god for Irish Y’vonne and her passion for collecting kisses and I’m instantly reminded of the Bob “Hurricane” Hazle my dad taught me like a ghost story, of 1957 and his August September streak of greatness and the Milwaukee Braves winning the National a League and then the World Series….

…..and now as I walk to the local survival store where all of us desperados stand in line for cigarettes, booze, porno magazines, lottery tickets, candy bars, and newspapers, there are pigeons in the window and I wonder if they remember beyond their poking through frat boy vomit for protein… i wonder if they remember their ancestors, those passenger pigeons who brought us news and tomorrow another World Series parade, a tomorrow fever that never ends.

cedar trees swaying

Holy Crap did they have a lot of money, so much that the kids had their own arcade in the basement – electric dartboard and classic Space Invaders, Asteroids, and Donkey Kong machines… Pinball, Air Hockey, a Ping Pong table. There were more rooms in that house than a bird has feathers. And to think how they started, a one room studio in the Good View Houses Welfare Complex, but the man and woman, the husband and wife were determined to twist destiny to their favor since they both came from some strange sounding poor ghetto and so they worked days and studied nights and eventually landed new, higher paying jobs, the husband in the Rail Yard as a Switchman Engineer and the wife did double duty as an Actuary and Dental Hygienest. It took 9 years, but they made it to that big house and they knew that people sleeping in the bush, loitering at libraries learning, eating at soup kitchens also made it.

There were five of them – three kids, two parents and when they moved, Sammy, the youngest had dibs on picking a bedroom and one of these rooms was at the end of the third floor hallway, far away from the parent’s room and yet, Sammy the youngest chose to be near mom and dad and there was no dilly-dally indecision in him. He didn’t need any time to choose because he suffered from awful nightmares and he never remembered any of the details, just that he screamed loudly and didn’t snap out of it until his dad shook him back to consciousness and so he wanted….he needed to be as close as possible to his parents. It was raw survival as real as any ancient shadow on a cave wall.

But as time wore on and the fears and nightmares waned and life took on more practical shape – getting good grades and a girlfriend, that room far from his parent’s room became attractive, a catalyst to thrills because it featured an outdoor porch, not exactly easy to slide down to the ground, but possible and if pulled off, Sammy could have slipped away at night, stayed out way past curfew and done whatever the hell he or his friends wanted to do – climb atop cars and kick in sunroofs, dip into the dumpster behind the Quicky Mart and feast on expired candy or sneak bottles of booze from daddy’s liquor cabinet and drink all night long looking for answers at the bottoms of bottles and more often than not finding them in song and dance.

Sammy tried to bribe his older brother to hand over the room with the porch, but he wouldn’t budge. Still, that room across from Mom and Dad had four walls in which to decorate and so up went a poster of Joe Charboneau and a Wheaties send away poster of Pete Rose which was more of a painting with Riverfront Stadium and a view of a bridge and river and as Sammy creeped through his teenage years, the Rose poster took on more meaning as he started to wander around and discover his town’s four rivers and bridges and railroad tracks. He also had box after box of baseball cards and a signed black and white mug shot photo of U.L Washington and his toothpick and another photo of Jason Thompson scooping a ball at first base and on and on his baseball Hall of Fame museum grew like anyone else’s, young or old. Sammy had his anchor of worldly items that grounded him, had him wanting to live another day.

Sammy didn’t know about Zoroastrianism as a kid, that exciting battle between good and evil forces that the Bible continued to propagate and then cartoons and superheroes but in retrospect, his life did involve two forces, one east, the other west and the two opposites fighting, but also pining to be together, one influencing the other and vice versa. It’s with this in mind that Sammy sat on a green public park bench and thought about a friend who didn’t make it past 40. He took his life for a variety of reasons with the ultimate reason unknown because there was no transcript of his last words. Sammy’s friend was born Gilly Treble and he wrote an ongoing serial satire of Ernie and Bert from Sesame Street, Ernie the eccentric, wild, unorganized, free one and Bert the far more uptight and organized, straight as an arrow opposite. Of course, we aren’t all one side Ernie or other side Bert. We are a mixture of both and thank God Gilly existed in Sammy’s life because he unintentionally (as it usually is) helped bring buried aspects of Sammy’s personality to life, that other half and Sammy did the same for Gilly and it’s with this in mind that Sammy imagined the fictional life of Johnny Atlas.

There were no numbers or graphs or charts on his scouting report, just a quote – “pent up anger” and the appraisers were not exactly trained like those from the PBS Antiques Road Show but they knew that Johnny Atlas possessed very few skills, just this “pent up anger” which might make him useful in bench clearing brawls, but was it worth keeping him on the roster for fighting? Well, it wasn’t much different for utility infielder Lloyd Small, not for anger, but rather his docile nature. He refused to even step on a spider and he lived up to his Small name at 5 feet four inches, a tick smaller than Freddie Patek and Jose Altuve. All Lloyd could do was octopus field snatch any ball hit near him, but he had no arm and should they keep him on the roster? He did have a soothing impact on teammates, keeping them off balance, meditating one day and getting wine high the next.

Manager Higgins decided to try the old osmosis game he’d learned from the Great Plains – shove two people – in this case, Johnnie Atlas and Lloyd Small in a locked barn and see what comes of it and an interesting development did in fact occur. They came together and discussed and then took action, they tossed a tennis ball through an old 8-pane window that had probably been around since the days of Walter Johnson and they learned over the course of five days how to paint corners with Greg Maddux precision. And they were not the least bit shy to show Manager Higgins their pitching prowess discovery.

It was like a page out of some old book reminding everyone that change can happen in an instant with a minor tweak of a compass like I’m gonna learn how to play the xylophone and what follows are thumbing through a yellow pages and phone calls and visits to a music store and in route meeting a lady with a bird on her shoulder and signing up for music lessons and stopping at a bar and buying a religious man a beer and a shot of Jameson’s and Tuesday becomes Wednesday and suddenly the day and time no longer matters and Lloyd Small and Johnny Atlas become the anger and the calm together and the pennant race is always near. It’s right now.

ferris wheels

I was 10 years young and had never thought about suicide when former Milwaukee Brewer Danny Thomas hung himself in prison and my dad wasn’t one of those dads who sat me down insisting I watch One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Midnight Cowboy, and Apocalypse Now. But he did play catch with me and maybe that guarded me from the not so pleasant realities that await us all….old age and in the case of Danny Thomas – broken dreams after being drafted in the 1st round (6th overall), mental health issues, him “knowing he wasn’t right,” joining the World Wide Church of God and not playing Friday sundown to Saturday sundown, 175 career at bats, charges of raping/sodomizing a 12-year old girl and ultimately suicide.

And then four years passed and Danny Thomas was still dead and the only thrills I knew were opening up packs of baseball cards and hitting line drive singles and the sing song voice of Melissa García. I wish I had more guts or smarts back then. I would have asked Melissa to take a walk along the the Milwaukee River. We could have held hands and kissed behind the Dairy Queen, next to the endless railroad track and I bet I would have remembered her eyes forever. Instead, I invited Melissa to a movie. Bad idea. No chance to talk. And then after the movie, I was too scared to kiss her or even ask her for a soda at Fitzgerald’s Pharmacy. As it turned out, I remembered her forever anyway.

I wore a winter hat in spring back then, a Cleveland Browns sand knit cap. I was afraid of nuclear disaster and dreamed of building a bomb shelter. Thankfully, I had my own bedroom and stacks of baseball cards and we had a color TV so I could watch every Brewers road game with Mike Hegan and Jim Paschke calling the action on WVTV channel 18, but then Tony Kessler came into my life and his promise of a “thrill” and the way he said it stuck out like a raft to the other side, one I never thought I’d be interested in. Then my failure with Melissa García happened and something began to eat away at me and I couldn’t stop thinking that maybe there was more and so I tagged along with a bunch of other friends, Tony in the lead, and we walked north for a good 30 minutes in a crowded forest of trees and eventually there was an opening and water below us and I immediately felt like I was atop Fenway Park’s Green monster looking 30 feet down, only there wasn’t a warning track or grass…there was water and rocks jetting out like shark fins.

I figured it was a place to wander down the ravine and maybe fish and swim, but Tony Kessler had other things on his mind and before he jumped, he dared us all to follow him and his bravery and risk taking didn’t surprise me because he had told us all that he planned on committing suicide before graduating high school. And so while he was in the air, I thought about him saying 18 years was enough and what my dad had told me about Koufax quitting while he was on top because of his arm and I later learned from the baseball encyclopedia my dad gave me that Koufax’s last season was a huge success – 27 wins and a 1.73 ERA.

As Tony emerged from the water below, he had a clenched fist raised up above his head like a Jesse Owens brother of the struggle salute. He howled, head skyward like a wolf and from that moment on, I thought of him as an Adam, a first and fearless man, someone who lived with one foot in life and the other foot in death, and that death must have fuelled his fearlessness and so I jumped too and thank God I managed to not hit any of the rocks, thank God because in the back of my mind were the Brewers being in the World Series two years earlier and how thrilling that felt and how much I wanted them to be there again. We all jumped and jumped three and four more times and we all survived and Tony Kessler did as he swore he would, he disappeared a few weeks before graduation and no one knew where he went or whether or not he killed himself and I guess it didn’t matter because we all needed that kind of mystery, that unknown as our own ferris wheels started spinning.

There were new people to meet.

barefoot Brandy

It was so many years later and yet she’d still appear in my dreams as a savior, rescuing me from quicksand or a tidal wave and in that I was never a good swimmer, never caught the rhythm of a stroke, not even doggy paddling, I figured it a good idea to find her number and call her, just to see how she was doing, but all I could find was an address so I sent her a letter. She was a writer, mostly plays and poetry. My letter went something like this…

Dear Brandy, I hate starting a letter with “Dear” but I’m nervous. I just wanted to once again apologize for the way things turned out. I know it usually takes two to screw up a romantic situation, but I feel mostly responsible. Anyway, I read a good one the other day and thought of you and wanted to share it…..

a little girl climbs up the steps and knocks on the attic door. 

“come in,” says the voice.”

“what’s a good day daddy?” she asks. 

daddy looks up from the typewriter and says, “a good day my dear is 10 pages.”

P.S. I still have the puzzle you gave me, that map of America with all the baseball stadiums. I glued the back and put it in a frame and it’s on the wall now so you’re kind of always with me as long as I’m alive and enjoy a place where I can sleep and dream.

I remember when Brandy and I first met. It was at a McDonald’s, back when I had the courage to strike up conversations with strangers. I told her I was thinking about joining the Air Force which wasn’t true. I’m afraid of flying. But I pretended that my interest in the air force was because Jimi Hendrix was in the Air Force for a short while and Jimi Hendrix was my favorite guitar player which was true and he was from Seattle and I always felt a debt of gratitude to Seattle for being the birthplace of the Milwaukee Brewers franchise as the Pilots in 1969 and that was true too. Brandy didn’t know anything about Jimi Hendrix or baseball and I didn’t know anything about poetry or theater so we had a lot to share. We talked that first day about McDonald’s once offering pizza and how plumbing probably saved the world from massive diseases and then where we were born, any brothers and sisters and then that led us to talk about how we got along with our parents and what we hoped to do with the rest of our lives.

I was reluctant to keep talking, not having much experience with women and all that, but it was as if she could read my mind or maybe she picked up on my fear because of my body language, me looking desperately for a place to hide my hands. She pondered out loud the thrill a child experiences when they wander beyond the confines of a predictable backyard. After she said that and without really knowing why, I accepted her invitation to meet at the same McDonalds later that same week and after agreeing I kind of felt at ease or more at ease anyway and so I told her about Richie Hebner once being a gravedigger in the off season, that players used to not make so much money. It was my way of trying to turn her onto the endless cast of characters in baseball. And it was a bingo bulls eye on my part.

“I assumed players always made a lot of money,” she said, “way more than teachers and what not.”

She was excited to learn something new and apparently it inspired her too because she replied with a confession. She looked at her hands and said,

“I take so much for granted, like how my mind and body are connected like I send a message from my mind to my legs and they lift and it’s one foot in front of the other and locomotion….far out!”

This inspired me to talk about the locomotion of base stealers and Ron LeFlore transitioning from prison to playing major league baseball. I soon learned that Brandy had a pet bird, a monk parakeet that she said she found, wounded in a Brooklyn bus cabin. She knew all about these parakeets.

“In such a cold climate like Brooklyn?” I asked, more than a little surprised and very excited by the strange geography of it all.

Brandy said the parrots escaped from a crate at JFK airport and the rest was birds and bees proliferation history. There was then a long pause and I mentioned the size of a horses toe nails and what was so great about our conversation was that there were no rules, just one random thing after another and breakfast coffee turned into a fish sandwich lunch and then we walked in Greenwood Cemetery and she took off her socks and shoes and of course I thought about Shoeless Joe Jackson and told her about the Black Sox scandal and for some reason or no reason we stopped and right in front of us was Henry Chadwick’s tombstone and it was all too much, too perfect because I had just begun to study a bit about Sabermetrics and I knew Chadwick was kind of the godfather of the box score and he knew way back when that a defender with more range was bound to make more errors so range was as important as the number of errors committed. I loved the logic in that, but it was my emotions that took over at that point which was rare for me.

“I have a 1976 Topps Lymon Bostock card,” I said. “He was shot and killed and every once in a while I look at the card and remember the fragility of life and I also have a Mike Hargrove card from the same set and he took his time in the batter’s box and that reminds me to take my god damn time too, that there’s no rush.”

Immediately after I said that, I looked down at Brandy’s naked feet and I swear she was flexing her toes as if they were yawning, but I knew it wasn’t out of boredom or fatigue, more of a relaxing feeling like she wanted me to keep talking.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t tell Brandy much about advanced metrics, but that year we shared together…wow! and after it was done, I returned to Milwaukee and got to see Robin Yount get his 3,000th hit. I forget who the pitcher was, but the hit was a patented Yount line drive single to the opposite field.

Signs and more signs

It was like no other year because there was talk about Milwaukee Brewer’s shortstop Pat Listach winning the rookie of the year and the Brewers had never had a rookie of the year before. It was still only August, 1992 but Brewers fans couldn’t help thinking back to first kisses and first drunk nights and in the case of Johnnie Raddle, a first homerun he hit over his little league fence. He was 48 years old when he hit it, yes 48 and no he wasn’t pretending to be Satchel Paige and play forever. He had hit one on a bounce to the fence when he was 12, but never over that fence so he recruited one of his roommates who they called the Squibbler because of a pasta dish he made and together they walked to Watertower Park and the Squibbler threw one pitch after another and Johnnie Raddle eventually hit one over the 200 foot fence and for the first time in his life he got to take that slow trot around the bases and ever since then, he started to buy people drinks at bar time.

Listach was hitting well above .250 and already had 45 stolen bases and doing whatever else it might take to win the rookie of the year prize. Johnnie Raddle and the Squibbler and three other tenants at 2345 North Nachman Avenue celebrated the Listach excitement by buying a cat and naming him Listach and it was that same day that Johnnie Raddle decided to switch gears in mid career course, surrendering his financial advisor job at the First Wisconsin building for a masters degree in physics at University Wisconsin Milwaukee, a ground level pursuit, to better understand how the universe works.

And that’s when they started to call Johnnie Raddle the Tinker Man because they knew he was gonna be poor after surrendering his big financial salary to become a student. They made jokes about him peddling on the avenue old pots and pans, yeh, the Tinker Man. He called for a group meeting and asked if he could squat in the attic for a nominal fee of 200 bucks a month.

No one complained because they could get the Tinker’s 200 for the attic which would give them an extra 200 to spend on beer and brewers tickets plus a new roommate which would make six of them.

The Tinker Man fixed up the attic nice and good too with a bed and a desk and a window

The new tenant Artie Hemlock didn’t say much and it seemed like he didn’t listen either because he often didn’t answer the other tenant’s questions and had a habit of fleeing rather suddenly in the middle of a conversation. But no one minded because he paid the rent and never complained about them making noise when the Brewers were on the west coast.

They later learned that Artie couldn’t hear out of one ear and his other one wasn’t so great either. He knew nothing about baseball so the Tinker Man took him to a game. The five of them typically sat in the bleachers because they were benches instead of assigned seats and so that’s where Artie and Tinker Man sat and Artie didn’t understand why the Tinker Man brought binoculars, but he didn’t mind either because seeing was what he did most on account of him not hearing so well.

The Tinker Man gave Artie the binoculars and told him to focus on the plate.

“Home plate,” he explained, “where the umpire and batter are. You see them standing there together, the umpire crouched a bit like he’s leaning on the catcher’s back.”

The Tinker Man looked over at Artie and his smile said it all. He had seen the catcher flashing signs towards the pitcher.

“Sign language,” he said.

And later in the game, The Tinker Man told Artie to aim the binoculars at the manager and then at the third base coach and then Listach took off and ran to second and stole the base and there was another smile on Artie’s face.

“More sign language,” he said.

It was later that same night that Artie asked if Listach the cat was named after Listach the rookie.

the Heckler

his parents and grandparents and just about everyone in the family believed in psychiatrists and for christmas they bought each other psychiatrist coupons. One kid they had in the family was named Harry and he became a fan of baseball when he was really young and no one knew how or why because no one in the family liked baseball, but Harry did and he knew all the teams and all the players and he had favorites and not favorites and he delivered newspapers for a living and lived at home with his parents so he didn’t have to make too much money and so he had season tickets to all 81 games and that’s where he yelled at players and some players laughed at Harry and other players got pissed off at him, but Harry felt better because he was getting all his stress and anxiety off his chest and so the family didn’t need to sign him up for a psychiatrist meeting and some of the family even started to watch baseball and see what it was all about.

In Grassy Fields

Ahhhh, good ol’ Mr. and Mrs. Spore, Bible beaters, espousing the sorrows of Job and King David. They never took to baseball, never talked much either and no one knew where they came from or where they got all their money, but they bought the house across the street from Gould’s Cemetery and would sit on the front porch every dusk to dole out change to beggars and watch the sun set. Their youngest son Benoit joined them, refusing to socialize with kids his own age. Mr. Spore set up a lawn chair for him, but then somewhere around his 16th birthday, he pointed towards Audie Langdon Park, beside the cemetery, and Benoit knew what he was hinting at. He dropped his head and dragged his feet there, to the park, sad and scared, where other kids, on the verge of leaving their teens hung out, to watch washed up top prospects, most of them drafted by big league teams with dreams of making it to the majors, but it didn’t work out for one reason or another so they came together, shipwrecked, to play and there were hard slides, brush backs, more of an old time atmosphere, no patting the opposition on the butt and joking with fielders when on base.

They went all out too, chalking fair/foul lines, cutting the grass, hiring an umpire, but like their careers, the perfection didn’t last long. The first batter dug his back foot in the dirt, messing up the chalked batter’s box like a dog marking its territory and ditto for the pitcher on the mound. Many of the players hailed from the Dominican Republic and when their baseball careers didn’t amount to much, they feared the backlash from those back home who lived vicariously through them so they hung around America and with broken English, took odd jobs – construction work, dishwashing, prep cook, garbage men. Others earned degrees from the local university, perfected their English and went the academic route becoming translators or professors.

One of the pitcher’s, Javier Iglesias, a southpaw, didn’t grow up in poverty. He came from a middle class family in San Pedro de Macorís and spoke nearly perfect English. He got drafted by the Chicago Cubs in 2004, 23rd round, sent to the Northwest League, Class A short season, in Boise, Idaho, to play for the Hawks. He gladly shared his stat line with the boys.

“I recorded 37 k’s in 23 innings” he boasted and then in a hushed whisper, he added, “with a 7.50 ERA.”

Benoit knew about Idaho, knew Harmon Killebrew was born there, in Payette, a mere 59 miles from Boise and he knew that Killebrew hit 573 home runs and more importantly, had “Brew” in his name and Benoit took this as an omen, a good one, to visit Bostock’s bar and grill, a place of initiation where older men believed it their mission to introduce teenagers into the “kingdom of drink,” to learn how to stand your ground, to debate about politics, discuss history and music and discover one’s favorite beer and booze and discover other’s favorites too, so when bar time arrived, you could buy a drink for a stranger and one for the bartender too!

Javier took a liking to Benoit, on account of him asking all kinds of questions, from the steak joints in Boise to the playing fields in the Dominican to baseball history and when the conversation came around to George Bell, also from San Pedro de Macorís, and his 265 career homeruns, Benoit, already stooped in numbers and statistics enjoyed a revelation, that if you add up Bell’s bombs, 2+6+5, it equalled 13 and though many shied away from the doomsday number of bad luck, Benoit welcomed it as a reminder, a promise that bad luck would be followed by good luck and then bad luck and then good luck, a see-saw of slumps and streaks all baseball players must endure, from Drysdale’s shutouts to Blass’s loss of control.

Javier was the only player not embittered by his own failure. He believed in passing on the torch to young baseball players, determined to see talent sprout, unlike first baseman Thatch Foray, a midwestern kid with a blazing 100 mph fastball who failed in the locker room banter, too self conscious and paranoid, conditions he never overcame, blacklisted from the professional game. He, like Javier, eyed the boys, but Thatch did it out of spite because he never had a father and his older brother never bought him beer or taught him how to de-seed a bag of weed. He looked long and hard at Benoit, never moving a muscle, a stare down like prize fighters in the center of the ring, the judge explaining the rules, the boxer’s eyes glued on each other, but not Benoit. He didn’t look. He became quiet, felt awkward, and didn’t know where to put his hands.

“You weirdo,” Thatch yelled at Benoit. “You flake.”

That word “flake” inspired Benoit. For a change he didn’t turn the other Jesus cheek, no water off his back. He charged after Thatch and when he got close enough, he ducked down and wrapped his arms around Thatch’s legs, a picture perfect tackle as Thatch fell back and hit the ground hard. No one interfered. Instead, a circle formed around them, an impromptu boxing ring.

Benoit pointed his finger at Javier and smiled, maybe for too long a time because it was Thatch’s turn. He came charging towards Benoit, tackled him and sent him backwards onto the ground, exactly as Benoit had done to him.”

“Eye for an eye,” laughed the scrappy second baseman from Reno.”

Benoit jumped to his feet. Punches were thrown, one landing on Benoit’s right eye followed by another in his gut. It was then that Javier stepped in and broke up the fight. And like any baseball brawl, the others followed, no one really interested in fighting, arms wrapped around the instigators “to hold them back,” peace prevailing and back to the game.

Benoit walked home with bruises and a bloody lip and his father, Mr. Spore, on the porch, as always around dusk, smiled at Benoit and without asking what happened, didn’t need to, for he knew in his gut that his son had entered the ring and now understood suffering.

That night, Mr. Spore bought his son a fielder’s glove and as is sometimes the case, synchronicity happened. The next day the boys were invited to play.