(Not That You Asked) (18 page)

The game ended in the bottom of the eleventh, when Boston’s Trot Nixon deposited a fastball into the right-field bleachers. Nixon had missed three weeks with a strained calf muscle, and thus the announcers were quick to compare this blow to the Gibson homer of 1986. Nixon himself, interviewed after the game, awarded the RBIs to God.
It was Jesus up there swinging that bat,
he told America, in the timeworn tradition of athletes who view the Kingdom of Heaven as an upscale suburb of Las Vegas.
¹¹

I LEFT VERMONT
with my back in spasm (in retrospect, it may have been my soul) and drove directly to an establishment called the Good Times Emporium, which looks something like paradise as conceived by a juvenile delinquent. It is the size of an airplane hangar and contains 50,000 video games, most involving Uzis. Also: pool tables, paintball, batting cages, air hockey, bumper cars, a wide array of fried foods, and a service staff legally required to wear blouses that make visible the tattoos on their boobs. The TVs are the size of billboards.

I was aware of the looming psychological danger. The Lord God of Sport had announced His presence to me the night before in that exquisite tableau of injustice. My hope was that He had gotten it out of His system.

In the second, the A’s loaded the bases with no outs. Byrnes himself stepped to the plate and hit a towering fly ball down the right-field line. The fellow next to me produced a noise like a horse being punched in the stomach. But the ball tailed off at the last instant, and he missed his grand slam by half a foot. Byrnes went quietly, as did the next two batters.

This was a squander of the first magnitude, a very bad sign. But we still had Tim Hudson on the mound. As the A’s took the field for their half of the second, in fact, Hudson had gathered a small retinue around him. And then suddenly, Hudson was trudging toward the dugout while various Boston fans loudly speculated as to testicular endowment. The announcers eventually identified his injury as a strained oblique muscle. This struck me as appropriately oblique.
¹²

On came Steve Sparks, a journeyman knuckleballer who had been released by the Detroit Tigers earlier in the year, not before helping that team set a major league record for losses. He promptly served up a gopher ball to Johnny Damon. It was now clear what was happening, no crystal ball necessary, and I began rooting—rather hysterically—for the Sox to break the game open.

Instead, the A’s fought back and found themselves up 4–3 with six outs to go. At this point, I turned to the least felonious-looking guy at the next table and said, “Don’t worry—the Sox will come back.” I was attempting a move patented by Floodie down in Miami: the rare double-reverse judo jinxball. Keith Foulke, the A’s closer, came on for the save. He retired his first two batters, then allowed the next two to reach base.

Up came David Ortiz. Because of his girth and jovial on-field demeanor, the Boston DH is often compared to the animated character Shrek.
¹³
Because he is also Dominican, the lily white Fenway rabble have taken to calling him “Big Papi,” one of those charming nicknames that no doubt make them feel very ethnic. Hitless in the series thus far, Papi whiffed at Foulke’s first two offerings. Foulke now drew a deep summoning breath and prepared to slam the door.

But that is not what happened. Instead, Ortiz began fouling off pitches, settling into his swing, timing Foulke. I could see this with agonizing clarity. Foulke, meanwhile, was descending into that invisible panic that afflicts A’s closers on the brink of a win that will deliver me unreasonable happiness. In the end, Ortiz worked the count full, then turned on an inside fastball that went screaming from the shaded infield into the blinding sun of right. Jermaine Dye, stationed ten yards too shallow, sprinted back toward the track. All around me, Sox fans rose to their feet. I could hear them cursing softly, making choked sounds of prayer. Dye turned first one way, then the other. He raked the air with his gloved hand, like a man frantically searching for the ripcord to his parachute. It was a very long line drive. At last, Dye leaped, a valiant and hopeless gesture. Ball met earth at the base of the wall and thudded and jittered. Both men aboard scored and Shrek the Rapist pulled into third, panting.

The entire population of the Good Times Emporium began chanting
Paaaapi! Paaaapi!
Young toughs of various ethnic flavors, boys who, on any other occasion, might have been happily knifing one another in the parking lot, were instead exchanging high fives and sloppy hugs, while I sat in a putrid cloud, breathing in the fried cheese sticks and chicken wings left to sit and the thousand happy beer burps offered up into the smoky air.

THE NIGHT BEFORE
Game Five, I had a dream, and in this dream my father called to say the A’s had lost 7–2, but that it was all right, they would be allowed to go to the Series anyway, an assurance that suffused me with irrational serenity. The amateur psychoanalysts among you will recall that ’72 was the first of the A’s three consecutive championships, and the year my condition was born. Thus, the dream marks the wished-for return to a prelapsarian state in which father and son are reunited and the A’s always win, even when they lose.

I woke with a swollen tongue and October in my heart. This was a Monday in Somerville and my apartment smelled of bachelor. The novel upon which I had diddled away the past two years of my life lay rotting inside my computer. I was supposed to visit a class of college students that night, to speak to them about how to survive as a writer without actually selling your plasma, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to cancel, despite the fact that half the class (the Sox fans) ditched anyway.

At precisely nine, I sprinted back to my car, intending to lunge for the radio. My cell phone rang. This would be one of my friends calling to inform me that the A’s were down by nine runs and that Eric Byrnes had been placed on dialysis. But no, it was a woman. A very jiggly woman, as it should happen, who, I suspected, would let me smell her neck. She wanted to see a movie.

I thought:
Yes, this is fate.
This is fate instructing me to go see a movie and smell this woman’s neck. Fuck the A’s. Fuck my whole messianic fan complex. The game was going to happen, no matter what I did. The Lord God of Sport would carry out His merciless will. There was no reason for me to suffer a third straight loss. So it was settled. I was off to the movies.

But I couldn’t bring myself to call this woman back. Instead, I sat gazing at the shitty little radio in my shitty little car and imagining I could hear the dull roar of the crowd, as I had on those many afternoons of my youth. And then (somehow) that roar was filling my ears and it was a sweeter sound—more human and comforting—than any I had ever known. Zito and Pedro were locked in a scoreless tie through three.

I knew then that I would listen to the game, all the way to the bitter end, because rooting simply doesn’t work in retrospect. It requires an instantaneous response, the building of hope, strike by strike, hit by hit, the gradual release of anxiety as your pitcher works his way out of a jam, the adrenal surge at the sight of a drive to deep left, the delicious horrible whiplash of a screamer snagged at the hot corner. The true fan, in other words, does not merely sit back and receive the game. He or she is working every moment, crafting fantasies, second-guessing, storing up regrets, tempering the unwanted equity of pain. This is the essential experience, the reward and punishment rolled into one, the sad duty of our sad disease.

So yes (of course) I blew off the tootsie and joined my friend Tim, who was at yet another bar with our pal Young Bull, a good-natured Texan stoner whose unseen darker regions had drawn him to the Sox long ago. In the sixth, Zito began to tire. His curve bit into the dirt while his heater, as if to compensate, rose slowly into the fatal latitudes. He gave up a dinger to The Brute Varitek, walked Damon the Apostate, then plunked Todd Walker. Zito was unraveling (as my students might put it)
like a tortured ball of yarn.
With the game tied and two on, Manny Ramirez stepped to the plate.

Since his arrival in 2001, the citizens of Red Sox Nation have enjoyed no greater pleasure than treating their dreamy left fielder as a communal chewtoy. His performance against the A’s was not helping matters. He had gone 3-for-18 without an RBI. His last confrontation with Zito, in the fourth, had ended with Manny waving nostalgically at a fastball on the outside corner.

This was cause for hope, of course, which, if you have been paying any sort of attention so far, is cause for dread. Zito delivered a strike, then a ball, then a strike, then another ball. His fifth pitch was a fastball dispatched, unwisely, to the same spot he had tried last time. Manny was waiting.
¹⁴
A gruesome and unmistakable crack rang out. The ball soared high into the air, did a couple of loops around the moon, and landed twenty rows into the bleachers. Young Bull jumped from his barstool and performed a tribal dance involving anointing his shirtfront with beer.

Here, down 4–1, I should have tipped my cap to the LGS and gone off to find a cat I might quietly torture. But I didn’t want to be alone, so I hung around just long enough to witness Sox second baseman Damien Jackson and Johnny Damon engage in a vicious collision that knocked The Apostate cold for several minutes. What secret pleasure I took at the sight of his unmoving body! It was probably time to leave the bar.

Back at Tim’s, I started smoking pot. I don’t know why I thought this would make things better. (Drugs almost never make things better.) Young Bull ran inside and turned on the radio. But I was feigning indifference. I stood on Tim’s porch and smoked and feigned and occasionally glanced through the window, where Young Bull was perched before the radio, clutching his head. He came outside a few minutes later to announce that the A’s had knocked Pedro out of the game and put the tying run on first with no outs in the eighth. In I went, fuckheadedly, and listened to the heart of the lineup squelch the rally. Durazo: pop out. Chavez: lazy fly ball. Tejada: grounder.

I returned to the porch, pipe in hand, intending to scrub my short-term memory clean. Soon Young Bull would burst outside, wearing the grin of a miracle winner. It would be terrible for a few seconds. Then it would be over and I could return to the proper miseries of my life—the losing struggle with words, the quest for a woman stronger than my self-hatred.

As it happened, Young Bull did appear before me. But he looked stricken.

“What?” I said.

“You should come,” he said.

“A homer? What.
What?
”

Young Bull went back inside.

A homer, of course, would have been far too definitive. You can’t blow a homer. No, the A’s had runners on second and third with one out in the bottom of the ninth. A base hit of any sort would win the game. They didn’t even need a base hit to tie the game. A bunt would do it. Or a sac fly. Or a feeble little bleeder to the right side. These did not seem like unreasonable hopes.

The Sox manager, Grady Little, brought in his volatile sinker-baller, Derek Lowe. Due up was Dye, the A’s best fly-ball hitter. But the A’s manager, Ken Macha, called Dye back from the on-deck circle and pinch-hit Adam Melhuse, the backup catcher, who had collected three hits in Game Four. It was one of those moves guaranteed to make Macha seem like a genius, by which I mean it made absolutely no sense. Melhuse struck out.

Lowe now did the obvious thing—given that his true intent wasn’t just to win the game, but to do so in a manner that would inflict maximum pain on me. He walked the bases full. Ellis, the second baseman, was due up. But he’d been pulled from the game in favor of Billy McMillon, who’d been pulled in favor of Frank Menenchino, who had exactly zero at-bats in the series. Eric Byrnes was the logical choice to pinch-hit, as he was batting nearly .500. But Macha had just inserted him as a pinch runner. So Macha stared down his bench—I like to think he did so with a funereal air—and came up with Terrence Long.

A reserve outfielder, Long had perhaps the most graceful swing of all the A’s. The problem was that his bat never actually hit the ball. At least, I had not
seen
it hit the ball. He was being asked to rescue the A’s and, by extension, to rescue me. To say that I smelled trouble would be like saying that Custer, upon reaching the Little Big Horn, smelled Indians.

Nonetheless.

Nonetheless, the Series had funneled down to a single batter. He reaches base safely, we win. He makes an out, we lose. The crowd out in Oakland was agape, athrum, ahowl, as was every member of Red Sox Nation. I myself spent the endless interludes between pitches pacing around the room, yelling out a series of increasingly demented bets
—twenty bucks says Long knocks himself unconscious with his own bat!—
none of which Young Bull would accept. No, he was busy hyperventilating, bent in the posture of a man waiting to be examined by prison guards.

To call this at-bat “a dramatic showdown” somewhat overstates actual events. Lowe made short work of Long, finishing him—if memory serves—in four pitches, the last a nasty sinker that dropped onto the inside corner.

In the moment that followed, Young Bull rose up and bounded over to shake my hand. Then he closed his eyes and smiled. I was working furiously to minimize the impact, telling myself this was just so much silliness, a juvenile attachment, setting over my burred raiment the flimsy and unconvincing robes of a New Testament fan. “Nice comeback,” I said.