Class A (39 page)

Hank looks unsure. “Okay,” he says.

B
OYHOOD IS FOR SAVING THINGS
. That’s the way I always understood it. Give everything meaning, reach out to touch all objects you pass, then pile, then hoard. Eventually, somebody will tell you that it’s time to cull what you have saved, make the tough decisions: If the words have faded off the front, then it’s no longer identifiable and should be disposed of. If two parts must be re-glued, then the sum of those parts is null. There is only so much space.

It was cars with me at first. I was a nonverbal, barely mobile toddler, one who inspired worry, was brought to developmental psychologists, where I remained disappointing on the office floor. That is until Matchbox cars were brought out. I pointed at the cars—
Toyota, Mitsubishi, Honda Civic
—animated by what I knew. Cars had faded for me by the time I was five, I think because I grasped that they were fundamentally ordinary, a new one parked across the street every day, something that any fool could know, own, drive. I watched my father watch games, and I dedicated myself to faithful knowledge of baseball, not so much how to play, but how to understand it holistically. The peculiar language, the ever-present past, most of all the way it could be quantified, the sheer amount of information generated in any given inning that somebody bothered to mention. On the 1991 New York Yankees, a terrible team twenty games out of first place, I knew that Steve Howe, former coke addict, rehabilitated his career and his teammates claimed in interviews he drank eight cups of coffee in the clubhouse before each game, more than anyone they’d ever seen. He was, thus, a “real character.” Scott Sanderson won sixteen games, but he lost ten. He was an all-star that year, for the first and last time. Matt Nokes had twenty-four home runs, and I had one Matt Nokes rookie card.

There’s a ball in my parents’ house, never used, bought at Macy’s right before a Pat Kelly and Andy Stankiewicz autograph session that, to my great surprise, was sparsely attended on a freezing November morning. The ink from both utility infielders faded off that ball because we kept it near the kitchen window. It is a pointless trinket now, just a baseball with no dirt on it. Which doesn’t really matter, because who are Pat Kelly and Andy Stankiewicz? Pat Kelly coaches a team in Australia, which almost sounds like a joke. Stankiewicz is a roving instructor for the Mariners. He came through Clinton, and when I said to him, “You’re Andy
Stankiewicz
,” he looked way too shocked.

My father had a Mickey Mantle rookie card as a boy in Brooklyn, and his mother threw it out, a piece of maybe false family trivia that used to enrage me on behalf of both my father and Mickey Mantle. At my grandmother’s apartment in Bay Ridge, I stared at her, wary, unable to comprehend how someone I was supposed to love could be so heartless toward the most important piece of cardboard ever in existence. Only when she fed me did the suspicion evaporate, and I remembered to love her.

This is a benign anecdote, one consistently proved so by the slew of people I’ve met whose fathers had a similar prized possession, whose clean-happy immigrant grandmothers also failed to recognize their significance. These stories take on a natural progression, moving from childhood pain into something funny, an adorable revelation bolstered by an adult self-awareness that suggests the appropriate order of a boy’s life. To care so much is a phase, one that men are supposed to look back on after women change them into something more sensible.

It is why adjectives like
cute
, at best, and
quirky
, and even
sad
sometimes feel most appropriate in thinking about Joyce. There is wonder, reverence even, in her saving, not family heirlooms, but objects related to memories of a game. That wonder is necessarily pathetic, powerless, especially because she is a woman remembering the exploits of boys and I have absorbed the idea that such remembering needs to have a penis attached to it. But I love her reverence, too. I love it more now that the season is almost over and mourning for something I didn’t know I cared about has begun to sting my throat and spread hot through my torso. And yet I feel as if I’m supposed to pity her still. She is embodying boyhood, and that doesn’t make sense.

·   ·   ·

“Do you hold on to things?” she asks me when she meets me at the door to her home, one story, four rooms, a few blocks away from the stadium. It is a
heavy
question. I begin to stammer. She assures me it’s not a big deal, she just wants me to be ready to understand when I walk into her place for the first time. She invites people in sometimes, like her father, and they, well. She goes silent.

She looks down. She rubs her hands together in small circles and says, “It’s cluttered in here, that’s all I mean.”

I walk into her TV room, and it is not cluttered. It is packed, yes. A fire hazard, probably. It smells of yellowed paper and cat piss, or something generally catty and sour. But clutter implies a randomness that Joyce will not allow. She smiles. She tells me she has a system. She snatches a box of index cards from an end table right by the front door. The cards are stiff, well stored. They’re color coded, each written on. She tells me it helps to have a guide to her things, her home.

I didn’t want to come here, perhaps because everybody I ever told about Joyce said, “Get in that house; the place must be a gold mine.” I knew that she would be open and she would be proud, and no reaction that I might have to her collection could come close to approximating what she thinks it deserves. She will present it as more than it is. That’s the reason to go. It’s not like I haven’t heard the term “cognitive dissonance.” I don’t find Joyce sad. I don’t think I do.

Her cat is matted, of course, nearly dreadlocked. Obese and almost twenty years old.

The light is dim all through the house, of course.

And there is one recliner, of course, angled at the TV, her shape permanently outlined in the cushion. There’s a couch to the side where I will sit. It feels un-sat-on.

There’s a LumberKings cozy. A LumberKings ashtray. There is a channel on the TV in the background that you have to pay extra for, all baseball, all the time. The volume is loud, a man with a voice like Dave’s but deeper is announcing the next hour of programming, a countdown of the nine best left fielders of all time, certain to cause some argument, certain to be a
whole
lot of fun.

“Did you turn this on for me?” I ask.

She looks at me funny. “No, I just like to keep up on who they pick. This morning it was second basemen. Can you guess who was number one?”

And then, before I can answer, “Oh, of course you can.”

She walks into the dining room. She says, “Look.” I do.

Baseballs.

They are everywhere.

From the door frame to the wall on the left side of the room, interrupted only by windows. Then floor to ceiling on the far wall, then mixed in with photos and cards down the right side. There are no spaces. This is a room three-dimensionally wallpapered, an effect that could almost seem futuristic if it wasn’t, in fact, the opposite. Each ball is in its own clear plastic box, the kind you can buy in bulk at Walmart for three bucks a pop, which, multiplied by 889 pops, is a lot of money invested in protection and display. But she has paid for the overall effect. It works.

“They all have names on them, the baseballs,” she says, because I’ve lingered in the doorway, too far from any one ball to discern what makes it different from the others. I walk closer.

Danny is on the left wall under the window. Fourth row from the bottom. Big
D
, big
C
, lots of practiced squiggles in the middle. I ask her to point him out because he’s gone now, finally moved up to High-A, hanging in the purgatory of being just removed from our reality, still vivid, more vivid because he’s ours to remember how we will. That’s when she starts looking at signatures more closely, Joyce tells me. Once the signer is gone. She runs her fingers across clear plastic, moving her lips silently, the box of different-colored index cards in her left hand. Old men in libraries, scholars or grandfathers or wizards from Disney movies, come to mind. Kindly experts, all. She stops her finger on the ball she was searching for, and we both crouch to look at it closely, as if it would now reveal something new, something that had lain dormant until Danny’s departure.

On his last night, Danny stood in the tiled, open shower room, naked and still damp after everyone had gone home. He faced the mirror on the wall and held a teammate’s hair clippers, the kind used mostly by Venezuelans to sculpt shapes along the sides of their heads. Danny put the machine on the most extreme setting, shaved everything onto
the tiles, cropping military close so that his ears stuck out more than usual and he looked four years younger, an unintended consequence of catharsis.

It was his most obnoxious display of defiance the whole season, perhaps his only one. I wasn’t there to see it, because no one was, but I smiled at this blunt, obvious gesture the next morning. Some of the team stood in a circle around what he’d left, stuck to the floor that’s always a bit damp and soapy. Some people laughed, maybe impressed. Some called Danny a dick or a faggot or, worse, a loser. The clubhouse manager pushed forward to look, muttered, “Fuck,” went to get his broom and his mop, and proceeded to wipe.

“I’m happy for him,” Joyce says as we look at his name. “I didn’t think he was going anywhere. He promised me a bat at the end of the season. I wish I got to say good-bye.”

“I think Danny was a little fed up with the team,” I tell Joyce. “He cut all his hair off and left it on the floor of the clubhouse.”

Joyce smiles, then looks serious and says, “What did they do with that hair?”

I feel my back straighten up, flinching away from her and her implied desire, both together. The sun sneaks through the slats in her blinds, which makes me all the more aware of her efforts to keep light out. Sun fades ink; ink takes priority. Joyce, I’m pretty sure, just made a gesture toward a hair doll, moving her interest into the realm of the desperate and bodily.

“Oh, just teasing,” she says. I laugh too quickly and too loudly, and then she does the same.

She is funny. Do I let myself acknowledge that? How does she see the way I see her? How does she see herself?

She did ask Danny for everything but the bodily—a hat with a note scrawled on the brim, a broken bat, a whole bat. A jersey if he could manage it. A printed picture of him, signed. His address or his parents’ address so that the give-and-take of possessions and sentiments could become potentially infinite. So where is the line? Or is there one at all? There has to be one, a defined place to separate dedicated from cartoonish. These are questions that have been lurking all season, growing louder as I have become more invested in the investment around me. Joyce is the most overt manifestation of fanhood because of all that she
keeps, as if she’s been waiting for somebody to say,
Prove to me that you care about the team
, so she can bring the person to this place, her home, say
look
, make it clear.

I can’t think of fans of film or literature who are anything other than harmless jokes or harmful monsters, nothing in between the lovable drunks in
Major League
and a murderous De Niro watching Wesley Snipes with a loaded pistol in his lap. When I tell people about Joyce, they inevitably think of Susan Sarandon’s character in
Bull Durham
. They say, “Is she beautiful? Does she give them a good time?” As though the only role she could possibly occupy in the minor-league ecosystem is that of a warm, wet, willing place to land for the night. Beyond that, what can she be? Plotting something, maybe. Or just lonely. All I know is that I don’t want this season to end in a few days. And it’s not just for narrative reasons. It is the feel of being swaddled in a collective compulsion. It is a haze, a high; it is an attempt at beauty. I like to say “we.”
We
need to win this one.
We
have got a shot.
We
deserve this. I feel not lonely next to Joyce. That’s what I know.

I miss Danny, too. I do. And I have saved his texts, along with Hank’s, along with Erasmo’s. They make up the only digital correspondence that I keep when I clean out my in-box full of my mother’s “How’s the anxiety?” and my girlfriend’s “Why don’t you just come home?”

I wrote to Danny, “Good luck in High-A! You deserve it!” He wrote back, “Thanks! God bless!” That was at 12:13 p.m. yesterday, stored and verifiable. I showed it off in the bleachers, let the coos lap over me. What a nice boy. We will miss him.

Joyce has Danny cataloged on her index cards under year 2009, also year 2010, a ball for each season. If he “retires,” the nice way to say he’s been released, and Joyce hears about it and has the time for editing, he will be reclassified, officially finished, no longer something to highlight, still on display, of course, but annotated with disappointment. If Danny makes it to the majors, he’ll be prized with the other elite, like Mitch Moreland, a 2008 LumberKing just moved up to the majors. He’s Joyce’s former favorite player, only a few years older than Danny. They played against each other in the Midwest League, paths crossing for half a season before Moreland was promoted. Joyce cheered them both at once.

I ask Joyce if she thinks Danny will ever be a ball to show off, one asked about.

“No, probably not. Almost definitely not. It’s not his fault, it’s just—”

There’s no nice way or even a definitive way to end that sentence.

We sit on the floor, and Joyce explains her organization to me. I notice an old IBM word processor in the corner, collecting dust. There’s a printer next to it with the perforated sheets of paper that you need to rip apart. She follows my eyes.

“Oh, it’s a computer,” she says. “Do you want one? No, you probably have one. Do you know somebody who wants one? I got it for free.”

It has to be twenty years old. She got it for free because some office closed or finally upgraded to a machine that didn’t rely on floppy disks. She got it because somebody was going to cart it off to the Clinton County Landfill, but thought,
Joyce might keep this; there’s no point in discarding something that may still have some function for someone
. And she won’t get rid of it without being sure that somebody will take it up. Still, she can’t use it. She won’t. How could something that plugs in and can thus be unplugged, its fancy blinking cursor disappearing, have a place here in this museum where nothing is deleted, nothing turned on or off? I glare at the blameless machine, then realize the absurdity of it, then realize the powerful contagion of Joyce’s perspective, her ability to make an out-of-date computer feel both useless and futuristic.