Benchwarmer Page 3

  Abby disappeared around the corner to attend to her episiotomy wounds. I looked down at the baby, in love, exhausted, scared. My eyelids were heavy. Someone spoke.

  “I wanted to play.”

  I looked up. A dark-eyed teenager was sitting opposite me in the La-Z-Boy, dressed in a baseball uniform like Fred Tenney’s, though he wore spikes instead of fluffy slippers and his uniform was smudged with dirt and was torn at the seams in a couple of places, as if he’d been in an altercation or at the mercy of a roiling mob. He was missing his cap. I recognized his dark eyebrows, his long, narrow face.

  “I wanted to play,” Fred Merkle repeated. “I loved the game. I did not want the bench.”

  The baby started squirming. I looked down at his tiny features. He was grimacing, bug-eyed, unhappy. I should have spent the previous several years devouring instruction manuals about babies and parenting and adulthood. Instead, I spent them praying for my life to be inconsequential and internalizing an ad hoc encyclopedia of failure to replace the clear ordering of the world that had been disintegrating since childhood. I picked up a little blue rattle and shook it. Jack started crying.

  “I wanted the bat in my hands,” Fred Merkle said over the crying, but when I looked up from my son the La-Z-Boy was empty.

  There’s no one else.

  Fred Merkle stood alone in the batter’s box in the bottom of the ninth. With the weight of the season on his shoulders, he connected, sending a clean line drive into right field. He reached first base safely, and the winning run advanced to third.

  My wife shuffled back from the bathroom. I handed Jack, still crying, back to her and felt relieved. Maybe Fred Merkle, despite his love of the game, felt a little of the same thing while standing on first after coming through with his clutch hit and passing the burden of the rally on to the next batter. It was up to someone else now.

  “Mama’s here,” my wife murmured. “Mama’s here.”

  Jack’s tiny arms flailing, calming. A stillness in the room, something new.

  Beloved life is loaded. Things can go wrong.

  The next batter, Al Bridwell, slapped a single to centerfield, plating what appeared to be the winning run. Fred Merkle, running from first, neglected to travel all the way to second base on the play. This was not uncommon back then. Also, it would have been clear to the youngster as soon as the apparent winning hit sailed into the outfield that a boisterous throng was about to swarm the field—it was not unreasonable to want to avoid this unruly invasion. But a ball was retrieved from the midst of the bedlam, and when Cubs second baseman Johnny Evers stepped on second with the ball in his possession, umpires ruled that Fred Merkle was forced out at second base for the final out of the inning, canceling the apparent winning run.

  The state of the field being what it was, awash in angering fanatics, it was deemed not possible to resume the tie game. At the end of the season, with the two teams tied atop the standings, a makeup game was played, and the Cubs won it to take the pennant. The incident that forced the makeup game became known as “Merkle’s boner,” and Merkle became known as “Bonehead.” The incident struck a chord, becoming for many years perhaps the most famous of all fuckups. Life will be left undone, joy forever nullified. It entered the culture like a seed sending down roots. From bonehead, a numskull, comes boner, the product of a bonehead, a clumsy or stupid mistake. The Merriam-Webster College Dictionary (11th ed.) identifies the first instance of the use of bonehead as occurring in 1908, suggesting that the very word may have been invented, this notion that instead of a brain, an individual could have a head filled with nothing but bone, to explain and curse and exile with mockery the actions of Fred Merkle.

  The two new words followed him everywhere. Worse, wherever he went they were waiting for him. In 1912 he smacked another clutch base hit to knock in the go-ahead run in the top of the tenth inning of the deciding game of the World Series. It seemed for a few moments that he would be known from then on as a World Series hero. But in the bottom of the tenth the Giants surrendered the lead and the game and the championship in part because an easy foul pop-up landed uncaught between Merkle, pitcher Christy Mathewson, and catcher Chief Meyers. The blame for the play should have fallen on Mathewson, who called for Meyers to make the catch even though Merkle was much closer, but a New York newspaper headline the next day read “Bonehead Merkle Does It Again.” In 1924, when he was managing minor leaguers, he walked off a baseball field as a uniformed member of a team for the last time, the departure prompted by a young player using the word bonehead to refer to him.

  After that, Merkle avoided ballparks. This may have saved him some grief, but it didn’t help separate boner from his name. When he died in 1956 boner appeared in newspaper headlines from coast to coast. In the following years the incident would recede somewhat from its towering prominence among athletic mishaps, crowded by other, fresher versions of loss, and the word itself would shade more often toward a different meaning from the one that had darkened Merkle’s life. But this shift in meaning didn’t add any retroactive dignity to the newspaper requiems for Fred Merkle.

  “Fred Merkle died last night,” reported the St. Petersburg Times. “And may his boner be interred with him.”

  Booing

  The baby wasn’t sleeping that first week. There were occasional exceptions to this rule. One afternoon it seemed he might nap. My wife had him in the bedroom, and it was quiet in there. I had to search for a while, but eventually I found the television remote beneath a cushion on the couch. Oh sweet nothing TV. Oh TV, my opiate, my concubine. Oh the canceling suction of your idiocy. These prayers of gratitude surged through me in the time it took to thumb the On button. The screen filled with fans booing, many with their hands cupped around their mouths to better project their virulent dissatisfaction. I’d missed the moment that inspired the uproar, and the announcers were choosing not to rehash it. It went on for several seconds, shot after shot from various vantage points, a stadium acridly united, thousands and thousands booing, booing. Then the bedroom door flailed open, accompanied by an exhausted sigh from my wife and the cries of our unsleeping baby. Before my wife got to the living room to pass me the boy, I turned off the TV. Everyone was still booing.

  Brister, Bubby

  Later there was a thunderstorm. Abby was on the couch nursing Jack. A beautiful, sweet mother, holding him and kissing him and talking in a soft sing-song to him. I stood nearby at the big picture window. It was in the evening, but there was still some light in the sky. The storm turned the light filtering through the leaves to the street we live on into something else, something hushed and glowing. We were inside, safe, and the thunder rumbled. The three of us. That light. It made me ache to say what it was, to hold onto it. I don’t know the words. It’s not about winning, but it’s not about losing either, not exactly.

  I’ve been adrift my whole life, as if afraid to attach myself to anything that might cause me to feel that ache. I spent one whole year swimming laps, back and forth, back and forth. Another year I frequented a driving range with borrowed clubs and swatted thousands of pale yellow orbs out into a field. It seemed stupid, meaningless, but now I miss it. I miss it all. I miss commutes I don’t have to do anymore. Someday I’ll miss the commute I have to do now.

  It’s an absurd daily tedium, involving multiple modes of transportation and several hours every day, more evidence that I’m authoring a ridiculous life, but since Jack’s birth and the financial statements related to it, I now thank whatever there is to thank that there is a small cubicle out in the western suburbs with my name on it. The name is on a nameplate in a slot designed to enable easy removal. I’ve seen other name slots go blank overnight. Picture lifting a thin slice of rye out of a toaster. That’s how easily my name will disappear.

  Until that happens I start my long commute every day with a bike ride past a massive cemetery. As far as the eye can see, graves. Stone markers, cubicles, nam
es: sooner or later everyone is an also-ran, adrift. I miss everyone. I miss Bubby Brister. Shittiness infinity, shittiness pure. I can see him yet—stumbling, feckless, attempting to escape a crumbling pocket late in a meaningless freezing-rain loss sometime in the 1990s in a half-empty concrete structure in a swamp in New Jersey.

  Sometimes I drift through the Google newspaper archives. I’m not looking for anything in particular. Below is the kind of thing that snags me, that brings on that ache. It’s the last paragraph of a wire report recap of a season-ending loss sustained in the Meadowlands by a 3–13 edition of the New York Jets. It’s from the issue of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune that came out on Christmas Day 1995. My wife, my son, a glow through the leaves, an utterly forgettable late-December football game, a backup dropped for a loss, booze-addled loons on the loose. Some things just make me wish I could live forever.

  A day after snowballs barraged the field in San Diego’s win over the New York Giants, there were no similar incidents from the sparse crowd of 28,885 (48,831 no-shows), although one snowball fell harmlessly in the end zone after Jets backup Bubby Brister was sacked at the 2-yard line in the third period. In the fourth quarter, three fans ran out on the field and were caught by stadium officials.

  Bust

  Most of us, despite our dreams, will not be discovered. The game will become harder and harder until it ejects us. As a high school ballplayer, Bill Bene was fumbling through this customary descent, his expiration date set for when his passage as a guess-hitting outfielder concluded. Instead, Bene’s life changed with the kind of sudden starry visitation generally known only in fairy tales.

  Former major leaguer Randy Moffitt noticed Bill Bene had a strong arm and suggested he try pitching. According to a conflicting version of the story, Randy Moffitt’s father, Bill, made this suggestion. What is indisputable is that Bene was blessed by the divine intervention of a close family member of Billie Jean Moffitt, Bill’s daughter and Randy’s sister, who gained worldwide renown under her married name, Billie Jean King (see Riggs, Bobby). Billie Jean’s relation pointed the coach at Cal State-Los Angeles toward Bene, and it was at that institution, on a pitcher’s mound, that he would be discovered.

  He first took the mound for his college team in 1986. From the beginning he threw very hard and yet with so much wildness as to be nearly useless to the team. Scouts began to appear, more and more all the time, drawn to his promise, ignoring his flaws, much in the way one falls in love. His college stats were not good, as shown most succinctly by a career ERA of 5.62. He walked more batters than he struck out. Still, the scouts swarmed.

  “We had fifty-five scouts at one game,” Bene’s college coach, John Herbold, said, adding for the sake of comedic hyperbole, “and we had so many radar guns going at the same time there was a power shortage.”

  Somewhere along the line the fluttery hyperbole surrounding Bene began to coagulate into something more solid. By 1988 Los Angeles Dodgers general manager Fred Claire, who by the estimation of awards givers at the end of that year would be deemed the keenest executive in all of major league baseball, was saying that Bill Bene had the “best arm of any prospect in the country.”

  In the spring of 1988 the Dodgers selected him in the first round with the fifth overall pick of the amateur draft. At that time I’d just spent the winter warming the bench for the ­1987–88 Johnson State College Badgers. After many years of defining myself in terms of how I did—or perhaps more accurately in terms of how I might do—while wearing a team uniform, it was my last season as an athlete in organized sports. This punctuated what should have been apparent for some time: even though I loved playing sports above all else, it wasn’t what I was meant for.

  In the latter stages of that last season, right around when Bill Bene was being identified as having the best arm in the country, I participated in a poetry reading. One of the other readers was a friend, Mark, who was the school’s reigning acoustic guitar troubadour. His presence bulked up the turnout beyond the skimpy norm for poetry readings. He got the gathering warmed up by cushioning a couple of his poems with his two campus hits, one a ditty about being too lazy to do his laundry (to the tune of “Good Lovin’”) and the other a Neil Young–saturated ballad about environmental destruction (“Yesterday I saw mother nature cry / down by the water side”).

  People whooped and pounded their hands together when Mark was done. I went on after him with the room loose and buzzing, and I read a poem about atomic bombs. I didn’t admit to myself until a long time afterward that I had lifted all the imagery in the poem straight out of John Hershey’s Hiroshima. I also didn’t consider until much later that the mildly positive response by the pot-addled, guitar-warmed audience to the chunk of fakery wasn’t necessarily the unequivocal message I first thought it was and that I clung to for a long time as if to a piece of driftwood.

  “Yeah,” someone said amid some clapping.

  “Woo,” someone else said.

  This is it, I thought. This is what I was meant for.

  I’m still clinging to that piece of driftwood, decades later, a proofreader in a cubicle on the second floor of a sprawling corporate office building out in the western suburbs. I get a small paycheck, some benefits. I had a week of paid parental leave just after the baby was born. It went by in a blur, and I found myself back in the cubicle, dazed. Life went on, hazily. A friend at work came by with a box of some of his unwanted baseball cards. I pulled out the 1989 Topps offering featuring Bill Bene. I’d never heard of him. The card identified him as a number-one draft pick. A number-one draft pick? This guy?

  “He’s all yours,” my coworker said. “I don’t want him.”

  Getting back to the routine of working didn’t add any clarity to those first days with the baby. I’d be sitting in the cubicle and then, without noticing any moments in between, I’d be standing in the living room with my arms at my sides, watching my wife hold this strange and volatile new boy in her arms. She was battered, exhausted, still bleeding sporadically from the episiotomy, a beleaguered army of one who nonetheless was all softness and love with the baby, and in the occasional moments when he slept and gave her a chance to think, her mind raced with worries that something might happen to him, to his tiny fragile life.

  Meanwhile I was coming down from the first high of the kid being born, when I thought I would be a different guy altogether forever, someone able to give myself over totally to complete holy sacrifice all the time, Gandhi in a replica 1970s Red Sox cap, transformed by love. Turns out I was the same as always, just more tired. I didn’t sleep, not as I’ve understood sleep all my life. I neared it, verged on it, but it was always truncated and shot through from start to abrupt finish with insecurity and worry, a shallow, famished thing, exhaustion a kind of hunger. One afternoon, driving down Ashland, I felt in the light of day as if I had taken some low-quality but powerful narcotic, everything murky but capable of sudden unpredictable motion—2 p.m., 2 a.m., life was steep. I don’t really know why, but I found myself in rare stray moments searching the Internet for traces of Bill Bene, the number-one draft pick.

  The number-one draft pick struggled. Early in his minor league career he had so little control over his pitches that he was demoted to remedial instruction outside of official action. In a simulated game, in which the only other participant was a teammate standing in the batter’s box, a pitch got away from Bene and broke the teammate’s wrist. The coaches further modified Bene’s remediation, replacing the human batter’s box attendant with a department store mannequin. Bene drew a mustache on the mannequin. He named it Harold.

  While working with Harold, Bene’s pitching briefly seemed to improve, but this didn’t last. You can dream of being discovered, of being told you have a great gift, but if this dream does come true, eventually a second discovery will threaten the first. This latter discovery is the one you pray to avoid: that your place in the world has been secured erroneously, and you will be
revealed as a fraud and cast out.

  In 2006 the former number-one draft pick, now many years removed from the revelation of what seemed to be a rare and beautiful gift, began using an online alias, Dan Stern, to sell hard drives containing counterfeit karaoke songs. He must have imagined, as he ignored copyright restrictions and evaded paying taxes, that he was invisible, immune to discovery, but the FBI eventually caught up with him. He was arrested, convicted, imprisoned. I found myself standing around in my home, my arms at my sides, wondering what happened to Bene’s accomplice, the mustachioed mannequin, Harold. A bird thumped head-first into one of our windows.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “It keeps happening,” my wife said. “We need to do something.”

  It’s a big picture window. The bird was just flying along and . . . wham.

  “God, imagine what that’s like,” I said, pitying birds.

  But then I thought about it some more. We can only ever guess. Every single step. Faking it. And sooner or later we’ll smack into something. We’ll be stopped.

  C

  Can’t

  A newborn can’t do much. A newborn can grip with tiny fingers and hold on. I don’t know what I can do. I know what I can’t.

  I can’t fix things. Things break, I’m fucked.

  Just before Jack was born, when my greatly swollen wife could barely breathe with the boy crushing her lungs from within, a heat wave descended and our central air conditioning unit broke. This malfunction and the costly and nerve-racking process of getting it fixed deepened my already pronounced distrust of the devices on which our lives depend. I no longer had any faith whatsoever in any of the things humming and groaning in my home—the dishwasher, the fridge, the microwave, the computer: on Jack’s arrival, on his presence intensifying the importance of life to not devolve into pure shittiness, each thing seemed on the brink of having some small, cheap, vitally important cog snap and cause the whole mechanism to seize up and go silent.