you mighta heard tell of a how to series
ah, the famous how to series. i didn't start it intending for it to be a series, but, well. that's just how these things turn out, sometimes. the first part was written in DC, the rest in london. so, i was missing the playoffs and basically going nuts. i think, if i wrote it again, i wouldn't end it the way i did. maybe i'm just in a depressing frame of mind these days, but yeah. i like the first part and the fourth. i like mulder going insane in the fifth. i like that i managed to actually write 'fuck baseball' without going into seizure.
Part One: Left-Handed Pitchers In Love, or How To Get In Trouble With The Ballclub
By Candle Beck
Barry Zito was drunk. Spectacularly so.
Anthony Pearl, two years out of UC Berkeley’s journalism school and two weeks into his first real job as a reporter, spotted Zito across the bar, through the hazy orange light and the laughter, the late-night San Francisco crowd that drifted and wandered around the dim room like brightly colored shadows.
Zito was by himself at a back booth, slouched down on the torn whiskey-brown vinyl, his elbows up on the table, contemplating a sweating mug of beer, a weird smile that seemed half-regret, half-amusement on his face. Pearl could tell by the slow, careful motions of the pitcher’s hands, the foggy distracted tilt of his head, that this was not the man’s first beer of the evening.
The A’s had lost that night, mainly due to a dismal performance by Mark Mulder, who hadn’t managed to get through the third while giving up six runs on eight hits and two walks, one of which came with the bases loaded.
Pearl had been at the game, trying to hold back his still-fresh excitement at being allowed in the press box, struggling to be professional and not appear too much like a high schooler reporting for the student paper, fighting his urge to stutter and fawn over the veteran stringers whose work he had been reading since he was ten years old, poring over the sports section in the yellow wash of the Saturday morning sun, smearing newsprint on his fingers.
Pearl was new to the profession, but he was pretty sure an exclusive quote from an All-Star ballplayer would be a good way to start his career.
He made his way through the crowd and hesitated a moment before offering his hand to the other man. “Mr. Zito? Um . . . Barry?”
Zito lifted his head, an instinctively polite grin surfacing on his face, before his brow knotted in confusion. “That’s . . . how did you know my name?”
Pearl blinked. Obviously the man’s state of inebriation was more considerable than first realized, if he’d forgotten his status as a very recognizable public figure in the sports world.
Pearl decided to forge on. “I’m Anthony Pearl, I’m with the Bay Area Sports News?” not intending for it to come out as a question. “It’s a real pleasure to meet you.”
Zito had taken his hand, the pitcher’s big paw wrapping around the journalist’s smaller one. Zito stared at him, his brown eyes shadowed with beer and the late hour, his eyelids half pulled down, the gears in his head clicking sluggishly as he attempted to put together the pieces of information he was receiving. “You’re . . . Earl?” he asked, a genuine smile splitting his face.
The journalist took the opportunity to slide in opposite the other man, replying, “No, um, Pearl, actually. Anthony Pearl? With the Sports News?” speaking slowly so as to facilitate Zito’s understanding. “I was wondering if you could comment on tonight’s game. You see, I’m just kind of starting out, and-”
“Earl’s a strange name,” Zito interrupted, taking a drink from his glass, leaving his fingers hooked in the elbow of the glass handle as he set the mug back on the table. “Don’t meet too many Earls, these days.” He cocked a skeptical look across the table, “Shouldn’t you be like sixty, if you’re gonna be named Earl?”
This was like talking with a . . . well, a very drunk man. ‘Good thing you’re not a fiction writer, your descriptive skills suck,’ Pearl chided himself. “Well, I, uh, guess, but I’m not really named-”
“Jack!” Zito suddenly called, waving over a bartender, who came with the world-weary stride of a man who has seen everything, including sloshed baseball players who couldn’t grasp simple words and phrases.
“Jack-from-the-bar, this is my new friend Earl!” Zito announced expansively, extending a hand from one man to the other, introducing them.
Jack, clearly barely restraining an eye roll, asked pleasantly, “Something to drink, Earl?”
“Um, no,” Pearl responded, deciding to stop belaboring the name point, sensing that it would be a futile endeavor.
Zito grinned engagingly up at the bartender, “How ‘bout me, Jack?” awkwardly patting his glass, which was down to its last few swallows.
Jack smirked, “I think we’re gonna make nine your limit, tonight, Bar.”
Zito’s face fell a little at that, but he tried to play it off cool, saying, “Oh. Okay. Yeah, I wasn’t ree-really so thirsty anyway.” As Jack moved away, Zito called after him, “Thanks, Jack!” waving good-bye to the bartender like a kid out a car window.
Pearl, a bit taken aback by the revelation of just *how* drunk Zito was (‘Nine beers?’ he thought. ‘Jesus, he probably didn’t even get that I’m a reporter.’), attempted to bring the conversation back into focus. “Barry, if I could just ask about tonight’s game . . .”
Zito pinned Pearl with his eyes, with the quick clarity of the exceptionally intoxicated. “Tonight’s game was awful. Hard to watch, you know? You know, Earl? Who throws firty . . . for-forty pitches in the first inning? Jeez.” He shook his head, stretching out his long fingers, drumming them on the scarred wood table.
This was more like it. Pearl leaned forward, wondering if he should pull out his notebook and scribble some of this down, deciding not to jinx it. “So, was Mulder upset?” Pearl had of course heard about Mulder destroying a trainer’s room after he left the game, an encyclopedically filthy tirade audible halfway down the hallway, the pitcher’s temper and competitive nature living up to their legend.
Zito rolled his eyes at the question, reaching up to scrub a hand through his shaggy crash of hair, parts of which stuck up at odd angles and other parts plastered down, still evidencing the hold of his cap. “Of course Mulder is upset, after what happened last night. You expect him to forget about it? You don’t know him too well, huh.”
Last night? Pearl shook his head, trying to draw Zito back to the subject under discussion. “No, I . . . I wasn’t asking about last night. *Today*, today’s game, that’s what I was asking about.”
Heaving a rushing sigh, Zito said contemplatively, “I guess you could say today was my fault.” He made a sloppy flapping gesture with his hand, “I mean, I don’t th-think it was, but maybe it could be argued that I had something to do with it.”
Struggling to follow Zito’s rambling train of thought, Pearl wondered, “How could today have been your fault? You didn’t pitch, Mulder did.”
Zito scrunched up his face, squinting one eye closed as he fell into a flight of rhetorical fancy, “I mean, is it my fault if he can’t separate per-personal stuff from the field? I didn’t tell him to go out there pissed off at me, that was all his idea, Earl.”
Pearl desperately wanted to take out his notebook now, the hope for an exclusive quote starting to expand into an inkling of a broader story, but he managed to restrain himself. “Are you saying that Mulder pitched badly today because of a fight he’d had with you?”
Zito nodded loosely, like his head was on a spring, and continued, “See, Earl, what you gotta know about Mulder is that he’s a pitcher. Pitchers are weird. And he’s a lefty. Lefties are weird too. So, you figure, left-handed pitchers, they’re . . . a lot weird.”
Pearl rolled his eyes. “Barry, you’re a left-handed pitcher.”
Zito looked surprised to have this fact pointed out to him, then grinned goofily, pointing a finger at Pearl, his thumb up in a gunslinger gesture. “Yes. Yes I am, Earl, good for you. But see, but see, the difference is I’m all weird on the outside, okay? I’ve got stuffed aminals . . . *animals* and pink pillows and high socks, everyone can see that I’m a freak. With Mulder, though, he doesn’t show it. He’s all kinds of freak, but you never see it on the outside, ‘cause he’s also all kinds of repress-repressive. So he’s mad at me ‘cause of last night, and instead of acting like a regular person and dealing with it, he pushes it down with all his other inner freakness and then goes out there today and pitches like crap. *Not* an appropriate method of handling things, if you ask me.”
Something about this, something about the casually familiar dissecting of Mulder’s psyche, struck something in Pearl, nudged his newly emerging journalistic instincts, but he tried to stay on course, tried to get the crux of the tale. “What did happen, last night?”
Zito snorted, his hand flickering in unconscious dismissal. “Stupid stuff. Stupid Mulder and Zito stuff. Nothing new.”
Frustrated, Pearl swung his arms up on the bar and leaned onto them, tilting towards the other man, wanting to catch Zito’s gaze and reel him in. “Well, see, I am new, though, so maybe you could fill me in?”
But Zito was off on another tangent, scoffing, “How can you take a g-guy seriously whose first and last names start with the same letter, anyway? There’s no pleasant-sounding contrast, it’s all mmm-mmm-mmm. Saying his name is like trying to gum somebody to death.”
Pearl surprised himself by chuffing a laugh at that, an image of a toothless old man gnawing on a baseball glove springing unbidden to his mind, then asked, “Seriously, what happened last night?”
Zito didn’t appear to hear him, rolling on, “You know his middle name is Alan? You know that, Earl? He never tells anyone, ‘cause when he was a kid they used to call him ‘ma’am’. You know, like his initials. Man, he hated that. Or ‘Moldy’, you know. Kids aren’t very creative.”
Zito slumped forward, leaning his chin on his hand, his elbow propped on the table, rubbing a thumb along the five o’clock shadow that darkened his jaw, and said, his voice going all nostalgic and wondering, “He told me I could call him ‘Mark’ if I wanted. Like, it was kind of weird that we still called each other by our last names after everything that’s happened.”
“Everything that’s happened?” Pearl jumped in, sensing that the explanation of that vague phrase might fill in the gaps in Zito’s narrative, but the reporter’s question was to no avail.
“I don’t know, though, it just doesn’t seem right, you know? He’s Mulder, he’s always been Mulder. That’s the name I say when I talk in my sleep, that’s the first thing I think of when I strike someone out, I think, ‘I hope Mulder saw that.’ Probably it is a little st-strange, though, huh, Earl?”
Zito was looking at him like he expected an actual answer, but Pearl was a bit shell-shocked, beginning to get a pretty good idea of the state of things. His mind was whirring, full of spinning things like ‘is he saying what i think he’s saying?’ and ‘jesus christ, what a story,’ and ‘the boys at the office are gonna go nuts,’ and ‘i can’t write this, can i write this?’ and ‘how drunk is he, he must be so drunk to tell me all this,’ and ‘i told him i was a reporter, i haven’t done anything wrong, haven’t lied.’ There was any number of things going on in his head, but mainly he was just trying to get to the end of the story. “Barry, what happened last night?”
Zito smiled quietly, rolling his eyes a little, “Oh, that. I told him I love him, and he said that I shouldn’t say that, or at least shouldn’t expect a response, and I said he was scared. That’s pretty much when the wheels came off.”
Although Pearl had guessed that it was something like that, hearing the actual words still threw him for a loop. “You . . . you told Mark Mulder you loved him?”
Zito grinned, suddenly taken with the reminder that he was in love with someone. “Oh, yeah. Been wanting to for awhile, ever since Baltimore, when we were out on that dock after the game, and it was pouring rain, I mean like end-of-the-world rain, and he said that he was cold and soaked and exhausted and that I looked like a drowned rat and that there was nowhere in the world he’d rather be. I wanted to tell him then, ‘cause that was the first time I was really sure it was true, you know, like bone-sure, blood-sure, heart-sure, but then he kissed me, so I didn’t really have a chance.”
His fingers itching for a pen, wanting to fill the white paper square of a napkin in front of him with his tiny, cramped handwriting, Pearl repeated, “He kissed you.”
Zito nodded, his eyes looking a bit sad, “Yeah, and probably a good thing that I didn’t get to say it then, judging by his reaction last night. Man oh man.”
Wanting to make sure he was getting everything right, Pearl said, tapping the air with his finger to emphasize each word, “Last night. When you told him you loved him. When you, Barry Zito, said, ‘I love you,’ to Mark Mulder.”
Zito reached across the small table to pat Pearl clumsily on the arm, nearly upsetting the almost empty beer glass that held the space between them. “Glad to see you’re keeping up, Earl!”
Pearl smiled modestly, “Well, I try.”
Tugging at his ear, Zito continued, “Anyway, I don’t think it was so much the me saying ‘I love you’ part as much as the me saying he was scared part. Jeez, I shoulda known better than that. I mean, it’s true, he is scared, but still, calling him on it maybe wasn’t the best of ideas.”
Getting a little caught up now, feeling like he was just talking with a friend about their latest stab at romance, rather than a reporter chasing a scoop, Pearl asked, “What’d he do?”
Zito made another flashing gesture of drunken sign language, his face vaguely distressed at having to recollect the night, “Oh, he said I didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about, I didn’t know anything about him. That he wasn’t scared of anything or anybody, including me. *Especially* me. Thought he was gonna hit me at one point, after I told him he was lying to himself, hiding the way he felt to try and avoid getting hurt, ignoring the fact that the lie was causing pain of its own. Nah, he didn’t particularly want to hear that, either.”
“How does he feel?” Pearl asked. “I mean, what’s he lying to himself about?”
Zito shot him a look as if it should be self-evident, a bent half-grin on his face, “Oh, he loves me. He’s totally, out-of-his-head, stupid in love with me. Has been for months now. He tries to pretend it’s just casual, just a sex thing, no biggie, just a comfort thing between friends, but he can’t pull it off. I wake up in the middle of the night and he’s watching me like I’m some kind of miracle. He’s always finding some way to touch me, hand on my shoulder, knee against my knee, even when we’re just hanging around watching TV, he’s got one leg stretched out so he can keep his foot up against my side. Weird, I know. But then, left-handed pitchers. A left-handed pitcher in love, that’s like a walking disaster area. I should know.”
Zito was so easy, so calmly certain of Mulder’s feelings for him, and something about it made Pearl feel kind of happy, warmed through by the idea of a person out there being certain of someone else like that.
“What happened after the fight?”
Zito shrugged. “He went home angry, went to sleep angry, came to the park angry and pitched like shit. Which I coulda told him would hop . . . happen. If he was talking to me. Which he isn’t. Whatever, though. Let him learn this one the hard way.”
“Learn what?” questioned Pearl.
“Not to pitch angry. And also that he needs me. And that saying it out loud wouldn’t, like, destroy the space-time continuum. He’ll fi-figure it out. It’ll take him a couple of days, but . . . yeah,” Zito nodded, confirming his words.
Pearl raised his eyebrows. “And then you’ll take him back?”
Zito nodded to him, smiling sweetly, his eyes tired and peaceful. “Of course. I mean, I love him. Stubborn son of a bitch, but he’s everything I’ve ever been sure of.”
Pearl’s heart twisted a little at the simple words, and he found himself nodding back, smiling at the other man. The story having come to an end, he offered his hand to Zito again, “All right. Thanks. Good talking to you, Barry.”
Zito grinned, half-rising to shake his hand, “Hey, you too, Earl. You have a good night.”
Pearl moved to leave the table, but only got a few steps before he turned back and said, “Hey, Barry?”
Zito looked at him, his eyebrows up questioningly, a strand of hair dripping in front of his eyes.
Pearl didn’t know what he wanted to say, exactly, and there was a moment of silence before he settled on just, “Good luck, man.”
Zito beamed, lifting his glass to toast the reporter, “Thanks, dude. Right back at you.”
Then Pearl headed out, his mind complicated with all that he had learned, already writing in his head what was destined to be one hell of a story.
To be continued . . . in part two.