Baseball is the only game that death is jealous of. Baseball defeats time. All the other great sports are run by the clock, therefore under the dominion of death. Only baseball has the possibility of going on forever. As long as you don’t get that third out in the ninth inning, there remains a chance that xxxxxxxxxx [something crossed out] you can keep plying [sic], a chance you can still win, a chance that you will never die. The Doublemint Man wondered these things as he kissed her, hoping that he could extend this day into extra innings.
Ted was reading this at his locker as Mungo put on his civvies nearby. “You seemed a tad distracted today, Teddy Ballgame. Didn’t see you go behind the back once. Fifty-three percent hit rate. You haven’t been that low since the dog days of ’76 when you had that bladder infection, remember? What’s the story, Jerry?”
“Nothing, Mungo. All is well. That’s the sto-ry. Up the workers.”
“Up the workers,” Mungo replied. They bumped fists and Ted walked into the hallway on the way out of the stadium.
As he passed one of the training rooms where the players received physical therapy, Ted glanced in. He saw the backs of a couple of the coaches sitting in front of a TV, clipboards in their hands, taking notes. Ted noticed the TVs were hooked up to those new machines called VCRs, or video cassette recorders, and they were watching a game from earlier in the year, slowing it down and speeding it up. These machines were amazing. This was the new way, Ted thought, you could now slow down life and see the things that used to speed by unnoticed. They were watching Reggie Jackson at bat. Reggie swung so hard, he’d nearly fall on his ass. The man did not get cheated on his cuts. Ted thought he saw a little hitch right before Reggie began the swing, a little pumping of the hands, that might cause a millisecond delay, and might be the difference between a hard-hit ball and a strike-out. He wasn’t sure if he felt this was cheating or not in sport, but he also speculated that if all of life could be slowed down, he might see it, and consequently play it, better.
Maybe that’s what pot does for me, he thought, slows it all down so I can catch it. Maybe that’s what writing does to life for me. Slows it down. Maybe my writing doesn’t slow things down enough. He wondered if there was a way to slow writing down, or Marty, or women. Maybe cancer was slowing Marty down so he could be seen, perceived accurately, the hitch in his soul. Or women. They moved way too fast for Ted. He wondered if he could put Mariana on slow motion on a VCR, what secret might he see, what insight into her. What was her hitch?
Anyway, he thought he might share his thoughts with the coaches, not about Mariana, though, about Reggie. Like many who were unable to play the game, Ted had great insight into it. Perhaps being barred from success in a thing makes you overly perceptive of what makes success or failure in that thing, causes you to obsess on its technicalities and mysteries; whereas the gifted do not learn, they merely do, the less gifted stew, and ponder, and worry; they learn it the hard way and then they can teach it. The gifted can’t teach what they never learned. It’s why most great coaches were never great players, and the best coaches were always mediocre players-Billy Martin, the mercurial, brawling, recently fired Yankee manager, was a brilliant case in point. Just as Ted was opening his mouth to share what he saw of Reggie’s hitch, one of the coaches became aware of his presence, shot him the hairy eyeball, and slammed the door in Mr. Peanut’s face.
28.
Ted found himself rising earlier than he did at home, and he’d been awake a couple of hours when Marty came to. “I wanted you to get your rest,” he said.
Marty made an exaggerated show of sniffing the air. “Watch out for Ginsberg.”
Ted held up the notebook he had rescued from the fire. “I’m reading your novel, Dad. It’s pretty good.”
Marty spat, “You were supposed to let that piece of shit burn.” He coughed and seemed seized by pain. “Goddamn Sox lost.”
“Did you ever try to publish it?”
“Writing crap novels didn’t feed hungry mouths.”
“It’s not like you had to quit your day job. Did you write at night?”
“Ted, will you throw that away, please?”
“It’s got some excellent writing in it.”
“Sometimes when you take a shit, you admire it for a moment before flushing, right?”
“If you say so.”
“Okay, so now we’ve had our admiring moment, flush it.”
“No.”
Marty coughed harder. “Goddamn Sox and goddamn you. I’m going back to bed.”
Marty went back to sleep. Ted made himself a sandwich and some coffee, and sat down to read more of “The Doublemint Man.” There was a daughter in the book, but no son, and though Ted knew it was fiction, he still felt somewhat slighted by that. Did it represent a wish on the old man’s part for a daughter? This was the danger of reading fiction by those close to you-you kept on looking for parallels and clues, like it was a puzzle, a message in a bottle. Is this what Marty thought of Ted? Did it mean that he did not want a son at all? Or just not want Ted? It was impossible not to project. Ted felt relieved he didn’t have a son to go through his own work with such a bias. But, as a son himself, he couldn’t help it.
Around noon, that awful buzzer sounded again. He knew of only two noises at his father’s door-the sound of The New York Times out of the delivery boy’s wild hand and the knock/buzz of Mariana. He was leaning heavily toward the hope of one over the other as he checked in the mirror to see that he wasn’t wearing the clothes of a twelve-year-old. Damn, he was fat. He jogged to the front door in an effort to begin to commit to losing some weight. It was Mariana. He was panting. How could he be out of breath from running to the door? He probably looked like a serial killer. In an attempt at nonchalance, Ted said, as if he were disappointed, “You again.”
Zero for one, Ted thought, and added, like he was trying for “touché,” “Olé.” Olé? Zero for two.
“Hola. You figure out what the opposite of fifty percent is yet?”
“Nope, still working on my calculations.”
“How’s Marty?”
“Oh, you’re here for Marty.”
“Why, are you sick, too?”
“I have a little tickle.”
“Maybe you should do yoga with us. It’ll help you lose some weight.”
“This isn’t fat. This is insulation. Winter is on its way. I’m bearlike.”
“Whatever works for you. How is Marty?”
“Door-to-door full-service death nursing, that’s impressive.” Nope. Full service sounded kind of massage parlor-y. Back it up.
“Not full service, of course, nothing of the sort implied. Extensive service. Far reaching. Comprehensive. Thorough. You can stop me anytime. I’m gonna shut up now. He went back to bed.”
Ted could not read her expression. Charmed? Disgusted? Something between?
“Sox lost, huh?” she said.
“How come everybody knows how a loss affects him physically? The old guys on the corner were talking about that, too.”
“The gray panthers? That’s what your dad calls them.”
“Yeah, those guys. They say they can tell if the Sox won or lost just by looking at him.”
“It’s the way he’s telling the end of his story.”
“You mean it’s psychosomatic?”
“At some level, everything is psychosomatic. Our minds control our bodies. I’ve seen people die of heartbreak. No other ailment but a broken heart, and they just stop, they can’t go on, they die of sad thoughts, of loneliness.”
“Does that show up on the autopsy?”
“It’s easy to make jokes about faith.”