I'm a Stranger Here Myself (4 page)

People sometimes ask me, “What is the difference between baseball and cricket?”

The answer is simple. Both are games of great skill involving balls and bats but with this crucial difference: Baseball is exciting, and when you go home at the end of the day you know who won.

I’m joking, of course. Cricket is a wonderful sport, full of deliciously scattered micromoments of real action. If a doctor ever instructs me to take a complete rest and not get overexcited, I shall become a fan at once. In the meantime, my heart belongs to baseball.

It’s what I grew up with, what I played as a boy, and that of course is vital to any meangingful appreciation of a sport. I had this brought home to me many years ago in England when I went out on a soccer ground with a couple of English friends to knock a ball around.

I had watched soccer on television and thought I had a fair idea of what was required, so when one of them lofted a ball in my direction, I decided to flick it casually into the net with my head, the way I had seen Kevin Keegan do it on TV. I thought that it would be like heading a beachball—that there would be a gentle, airy
ponk
sound and that the ball would lightly leave my brow and drift in a pleasing arc into the net. But of course it was like heading a bowling ball. I have never felt anything so startlingly not like I expected it to feel. I walked around for four hours on wobbly legs with a big red circle and the word “MITRE” imprinted on my forehead and vowed never again to do anything so foolish and painful.

I bring this up here because the World Series has just started, and I want you to know why I am very excited about it. The World Series, I should perhaps explain, is the annual baseball contest between the champion of the American League and the champion of the National League.

Actually, that’s not quite true because they changed the system some years ago. The trouble with the old way of doing things was that it involved only two teams. Now, you don’t have to be a brain surgeon to work out that if you could somehow contrive to include more teams there would be a lot more money in the thing.

So each league divided itself into three divisions of four or five teams each. So now the World Series is not a contest between the two best teams in baseball—at least not necessarily—but rather between the winners of a series of playoff games involving the Western, Eastern, and Central divisional champions of each league, plus (and this was particuarly inspired, I think) a pair of “wild card” teams that didn’t win anything at all.

It is all immensely complicated, but essentially it means that practically every team in baseball except the Chicago Cubs gets a chance to go to the World Series.

The Chicago Cubs don’t get to go because they never manage to qualify even under a system as magnificently accommodating as this. Often they
almost
qualify, and sometimes they are in such a commanding position that you cannot believe they won’t qualify, but always in the end they doggedly manage to come up short. Whatever it takes—losing seventeen games in a row, letting easy balls go through their legs, crashing comically into each other in the outfield—you can be certain the Cubs will manage it.

They have been doing this, reliably and efficiently, for over half a century. They haven’t been in a World Series since 1945. Stalin had good years more recently than that. This heartwarming annual failure by the Cubs is almost the only thing in baseball that hasn’t changed in my lifetime, and I appreciate that very much.

It’s not easy being a baseball fan because baseball fans are a hopelessly sentimental bunch, and there is no room for sentiment in something as wildly lucrative as an American sport. For anyone from outside America, one of the most remarkable aspects of American sports is how casually franchises abandon their loyal fans and move to a new city. In English soccer, it would be unthinkable for, say, Manchester United to move to London or Everton to find a new home in Portsmouth, or anyone to go anywhere really, but here that sort of thing happens all the time, sometimes more than once. The Braves began life in Boston, then moved to Milwaukee, then moved to Atlanta. The A’s started in Philadelphia, then switched to Kansas City, then pushed on to Oakland.

Meanwhile, the Major Leagues have repeatedly expanded to where they have reached the point where it is deucedly hard, for me at any rate, to keep track of it all. Of the thirty teams in Major League baseball, just eleven are where they were when I was a kid. There are teams out there now that I know nothing about. Without looking at the standings, I couldn’t tell you whether the Arizona Diamondbacks are in the National League or the American League. That’s a terrifying confession for someone who loves the game.

Even when teams stay put, they don’t actually stay put. I mean by this that they are constantly tearing down old stadiums to build new ones. Call me eccentric, call me fastidious, but I truly believe that baseball should only be watched in an old stadium. It used to be that every big American city had a venerable ballpark. Generally these were dank and creaky, but they had character. You would get splinters from the seats, the soles of your shoes would congeal to the floor from all the years of sticky stuff that had been spilled during exciting moments, and your view would inevitably be obscured by a cast-iron column supporting the roof. But that was all part of the glory.

Only four of these old parks are left, and two of them— Yankee Stadium in New York and Fenway Park in Boston— are under threat. I won’t say that Fenway’s relative nearness was the decisive consideration in our settling in New Hampshire, but it was certainly a factor. Now the owners want to tear it down and build a new stadium.

In fairness it must be said that the new ballparks of the 1990s, as opposed to the multipurpose arenas built in the previous thirty years, do strive to keep the character and intimacy of the old ballparks—sometimes even improve on them—but they have one inescapable, irremediable flaw. They are new. They have no history, no connection with a glorious and continuous past. No matter how scrupulous a new Fenway they build, it won’t be the place where Ted Williams batted. It won’t make your feet stick. It won’t echo in the same way. It won’t smell funny. It won’t be Fenway.

I keep saying that I won’t go to the new park when they finally raze Fenway, but I know I’m lying because I am hopelessly addicted to the game. All of which increases my almost boundless respect and admiration for the hapless Chicago Cubs. To their credit, the Cubs have never threatened to leave Chicago and continue to play at Wrigley Field. They even still play mostly day games—the way God intended baseball to be played. A day game at Wrigley Field is one of the great American experiences.

And here’s the problem. Nobody deserves to go to the World Series more than the Chicago Cubs. But they can’t go because that would spoil their custom of never going. It is an irreconcilable paradox.

You see what I mean when I say that it is not easy being a baseball fan?

The other day I called my computer helpline, because I needed to be made to feel ignorant by someone much younger than me, and the boyish-sounding person who answered told me he required the serial number on my computer before he could deal with me.

“And where do I find that?” I asked warily.

“It’s on the bottom of the CPU functional dysequilibrium unit,” he said, or words of a similarly confounding nature.

This, you see, is why I don’t call my computer helpline very often. We haven’t been talking four seconds and already I can feel a riptide of ignorance and shame pulling me out into the icy depths of Humiliation Bay. Any minute now, I know with a sense of doom, he’s going to ask me how much RAM I have.

“Is that anywhere near the TV-screen thingy?” I ask helplessly.

“Depends. Is your model the Z-40LX Multimedia HPii or the ZX46/2Y Chromium B-BOP?”

And so it goes. The upshot is that the serial number for my computer is engraved on a little metal plate on the bottom of the main control box—the one with the CD drawer that is kind of fun to open and shut. Now call me an idealistic fool, but if I were going to put an identifying number on every computer I sold and then require people to regurgitate that number each time they wanted to communicate with me, I don’t believe I would put it in a place that required the user to move furniture and get the help of a neighbor each time he wished to consult it. However, that is not my point.

My model number was something like CQ124765900-03312-DiP/22/4. So here is my point:
Why?
Why does my computer need a number of such breathtaking complexity? If every neutrino in the universe, every particle of matter between here and the farthest wisp of receding Big Bang gas somehow acquired a computer from this company there would still be plenty of spare numbers under such a system.

Intrigued, I began to look at all the numbers in my life, and nearly every one of them was absurdly excessive. My Visa card number, for instance, has thirteen digits. That’s enough for almost two trillion potential customers. Who are they trying to kid? My Budget Rent-a-Car card has no fewer than seventeen digits. Even my local video store appears to have 1.9 billion customers on its rolls (which may explain why
L.A. Confidential
is always out).

The most impressive by far is my Blue Cross/Blue Shield medical card, which not only identifies me as No. YGH475907018 00 but also as a member of Group 02368. Presumably, then, each group has a person in it with the same number as mine. You can almost imagine us having reunions.

Now all this is a long way of getting around to the main point of this discussion, which is that one of the great, great improvements in American life in the last twenty years is the advent of phone numbers that any fool can remember.

A long time ago people realized that you could remember numbers more easily if you relied on the letters rather than the numbers. In my hometown of Des Moines, for instance, if you wanted to call time, the official number was 244-5646, which of course no one could handily recall. But if you dialed BIG JOHN you got the same number, and
everybody
could remember BIG JOHN (except, curiously, my mother, who was a bit hazy on the Christian name part, and so generally ended up asking the time of complete strangers whom she had just woken, but that’s another story).

Now, of course, every business has a 1-800 number— 1-800-FLY TWA or 244-GET PIZZA or whatever. Not many changes in the past two decades have made life immeasurably better for simple folk like me, but this unquestionably has.

Now here is my big idea. I think we should all have one number for everything. Mine naturally would be 1-800-BILL. This number would do for everything—it would make my phone ring, it would appear on my checks and credit cards, it would adorn my passport, it would get me a video.

Of course, it would mean rewriting a lot of computer programs, but I’m sure it could be done. I intend to take it up with my own computer company, just as soon as I can get at that serial number again.

I have very happy hair. No matter how serene and composed the rest of me is, no matter how grave and formal the situation, my hair is always having a party. In any group photograph you can spot me at once because I am the person at the back whose hair seems to be listening, in some private way, to a disco album called “Dance Craze ’97.”

Every few months, with a sense of foreboding, I take this hair of mine uptown to the barbershop and allow one of the men there to amuse himself with it for a bit. I don’t know why, but going to the barber always brings out the wimp in me. There is something about being enshrouded in a cape and having my glasses taken away, then being set about the head with sharp cutting tools, that leaves me feeling helpless and insecure.

I mean, there you are, armless and squinting, and some guy you don’t know is doing serious, almost certainly regrettable, things to the top of your head. I must have had 250 haircuts in my life by now, and if there is one thing I have learned it is that a barber will give you the haircut he wants to give you and there is not a thing you can do about it. So the whole experience is filled with trauma for me. This is particularly so as I always get the barber I was hoping not to get—usually the new guy they call “Thumbs.” I especially dread the moment when he sits you in the chair and the two of you stare together at the hopeless catastrophe that is the top of your head, and he says, in a worryingly eager way, “So what would you like me to do with this?”

“Just a simple tidy-up,” I say, looking at him with touching hopefulness but knowing that already he is thinking in terms of extravagant bouffants and mousse-stiffened swirls, possibly a fringe of bouncy ringlets. “You know, something anonymous and respectable—like a banker or an accountant.”

“See any styles up there you like?” he says and indicates a wall of old black-and-white photographs of smiling men whose hairstyles seem to have been modeled on Thunder-birds characters.

“Actually, I was hoping for something a bit less emphatic.”

“A more natural look, in other words?”

“Exactly.”

“Like mine, for instance?”

I glance at the barber. His hairstyle brings to mind an aircraft carrier advancing through choppy seas, or perhaps an extravagant piece of topiary.

“Even more subdued than that,” I suggest nervously.

He nods thoughtfully, in a way that makes me realize we are not even in the same universe taste-in-hairwise, and says in a sudden, decisive tone: “I know just what you want. We call it the Wayne Newton.”

“That’s really not quite what I had in mind,” I start to protest, but already he is pushing my chin into my chest and seizing his shears.

“It’s a very popular look,” he adds. “Everyone on the bowling team has it.” And with a buzz of motors he starts taking hair off my head as if stripping wallpaper.

“I really don’t want the Wayne Newton look,” I murmur with feeling, but my chin is buried in my chest and in any case my voice is drowned in the hum of his dancing clippers.

And so I sit for a small, tortured eternity, staring at my lap, under strict instructions not to move, listening to terrifying cutting machinery trundling across my scalp. Out of the corner of my eye I can see large quantities of shorn hair tumbling onto my shoulders.

“Not too much off,” I bleat from time to time, but he is engaged in a lively conversation with the barber and customer at the next chair about the prospects for the Boston Celtics and only occasionally turns his attention to me and my head, generally to mutter, “Oh, dang,” or “Whoopsie.”

Eventually he jerks my head up and says: “How’s that for length?”

I squint at the mirror, but without my glasses all I can see is what looks like a pink balloon in the distance. “I don’t know,” I say uncertainly. “It looks awfully short.”

I notice he is looking unhappily at everything above my eyebrows. “Did we decide on a Paul Anka or a Wayne Newton?” he asks.

“Well, neither, as a matter of fact,” I say, pleased to have an opportunity to get this sorted out at last. “I just wanted a modest tidy-up.”

“Let me ask you this,” he says, “how fast does your hair grow?”

“Not very,” I say and squint harder at the mirror, but I still can’t see a thing. “Why, is there a problem?”

“Oh, no,” he says, but in that way that means, “Oh, yes.” “No, it’s fine,” he goes on. “It’s just that I seem to have done the left side of your head in a Paul Anka and the right in a Wayne Newton. Let me ask you this then: Do you have a big hat?”

“What have you done?” I ask in a rising tone of alarm, but he has gone off to his colleagues for a consultation. They talk in whispers and look at me the way you might look at a road-accident victim.

“I think it must be these antihistamines I’m taking,” I hear Thumbs say to them sadly.

One of the colleagues comes up for a closer look and decides it’s not as disastrous as it looks. “If you take some of this hair here from behind the left ear,” he says, “and take it around the back of his head and hook it over the other ear, and maybe reattach some of this from here, then you can make it into a modified Barney Rubble.” He turns to me. “Will you be going out much over the next few weeks, sir?”

“Did you say ‘Barney Rubble’?” I whimper in dismay.

“Unless you go for a Hercule Poirot,” suggests the other barber.

“Hercule Poirot?” I whimper anew.

They leave Thumbs to do what he can. After another ten minutes, he hands me my glasses and lets me raise my head. In the mirror I am confronted with an image that brings to mind a lemon meringue pie with ears. Over my shoulder, Thumbs is smiling proudly.

“Turned out pretty good after all, eh?” he says.

I am unable to speak. I hand him a large sum of money and stumble from the shop. I walk home with my collar up and my head sunk into my shoulders.

At the house, my wife takes one look at me. “Do you say something to upset them?” she asks in sincere wonder.

I shrug helplessly. “I told him I wanted to look like a banker.”

She gives one of those sighs that come to all wives eventually. “Well, at least you rhyme,” she mutters in that odd, enigmatic way of hers, and goes off to get the big hat.