two games for the price of one--just what i needed
thanks all who proferred birthday wishes and etc. just came in, and maybe i'm leaving again in a few minutes, i'm waiting for a phone call.
in the meantime, someone help me, i've been totally won over by roger clemens. i hate it when that happens.
also. i found this today, and um.
this was written last year, last summer. like, how i wrote 'el rey' in one night while seriously fucked up? wrote this the next night, the same state of affairs except another day of not having slept tacked atop it. so. i didn't think it was any good. but then i found it and it's really weird and the timeline is all sorts of complicated, but it's, like. strange-creepy-cool. capturing the delicate insanity of barry zito--apparently all you need is some speed. who knew!
just to clear it up a bit:
1999-Zito went from A-ball in Visalia to AAA Vancouver in four months. Mulder started the year in AAA, along with Tim Hudson, who was called up in June of that year.
2000-Mulder and Zito both started out in AAA Sacramento. Mulder went up at the end of April, Zito in July. Zito had nothing if not earned his ascent. Mulder, not so much, but we're willing to forgive him. Mostly.
again. fucked up story.
See Right Through
By Candle Beck
--September 2000--
Nobody looks at Zito twice, because when he comes up in 2000, he’s all of twenty-two years old, and, first off, he’s got a cross-body motion and more of a leg-kick than a fucking Rockette, and, secondly, he couldn’t break ninety-two miles per hour if you put a gun to his head.
By September, his fastball is down to eighty-eight, eighty-seven. Eighty-six in the later innings if he’s trying to go the distance. Eighty-five if he lied about being sore and tired when the trainers asked. But, eighty-seven is a fair average.
Everyone other than Zito seems surprised by Zito’s success. Eighty-seven mile per hour fastball. You see harder throws than that at those midway booths down on the Boardwalk, with the radar gun and if you can guess how hard you’re throwing, you win a stuffed Tigger or a pirate hat or something.
No one can figure out how this kid has come all the way through the minors and so quickly, into the chaos of his first pennant race, when all he’s got is a (slow) fastball, and (hittable) change, and a curveball that most everyone thinks is some sort of trick at first, peering for the invisible track that guided it down, checking for strings tied to the stitches.
There’s no trick. No strings, or tracks, or scuffmarks. No Vaseline under his cap brim, no strip of sandpaper inside his mitt, or any the other shit various paranoid people have accused him of. It can get pretty fucking obnoxious, but Zito’s a laidback kinda guy.
He just doesn’t look like he should be this good, that’s all. He doesn’t have the right face for baseball, so they don’t believe he can really do what he does. But that’s not Zito’s problem. It’s a problem localizing in his general area, but other people put it there, so they can be suspicious and blind and blame him for his face, and it’s got nothing to do with him. All Zito is here to do is pitch.
It’s been just about fifteen months since he was drafted. Last year he left USC a week before classes ended, and lit out for Visalia, the car radio volume up so high he blew out a speaker. Now everything sounds lopsided.
He went from Class A to AA to AAA in four months. Minor league baseball went so quickly, the edges blurred. The Oakland A’s were broke and dying for young pitching (and very little has changed), and they didn’t wait to see if he was a fluke.
This kind of thing is bound to happen.
*
--February-June 1999--
Sometime in the first half of his minor league year, Zito’s mom almost died.
A bad summer’s day with the cotton-scrap of the moon in the dull blue sky, looking parched and lifeless and eerie, and the doctor at Cedar Sinai in Los Angeles told Zito’s father and sisters to make the most of the few hours Roberta Zito had left.
That night, with the fucking moon trailing him every foot of the way, Zito sped through the Central Valley, still half-dressed in his uniform, his jersey crumpled in the backseat and his plain white undershirt sweat-soaked in a T shape between his shoulder blades and down his spine.
He was crying, the windows all the way down, and his hair lashing into his face, getting damp at the ends because he was sobbing, okay, that’s what he was doing. Face sand-burned, eyes too wide and his nose running, wiped messily on the back of his arm after he’d emptied the glove compartment of its paper napkins.
His dad had called just after the game, and said, in a voice that was all choked-off and tinged with a sharp violent undertone of denial, that she wasn’t expected to survive the night. Zito stood at the clubhouse payphone, smashed paper cups under his feet, staring at the hardened pieces of gum stuck to the wall.
Ten minutes later, he was on the highway and driving south very fast, because his mother was dying, she’d been dying all spring in minutes and breaths, silently watching the grass turn bright again out her hospital room window.
Zito was having visions, premonitions, of his first major league start, his first trip to the postseason, the perfect game he would someday hurl, all the stuff that was gonna happen to him, all the new stories he would have. And he could see the empty space between his father and oldest sister in the stands above the dugout as they cheered for him.
But space is the wrong word, because even if his dad and sister were scrunched together close enough to lose buttons in each other’s pockets, even then, the empty spot would be there. It wasn’t space, not a physical expanse where his mother once was and is no more. Nothing so bold. It wasn’t real heartbreak, but more like an aortic valve opened (and this valve was not the thing from medical textbooks, but the thing on bicycle wheels, sticking out of his heart), and a certain amount of air let out, leaving his heart a bit deflated, and frail, and heavier. An opened heart, and the opposite of space.
And that was all it would be, really. It’s just, it would be a lack. An absence. It was going to make an echoey sound at every happy moment Zito would have for the rest of his life. He could see all this so clearly.
He was still a hundred miles away, crying till it felt like drowning, hysterically convinced that if he could just get there in time, before his mother stopped being anything but a thought, if he could get there before it was too late, this day could still be saved (somehow).
It’s okay. Zito was twenty years old, and still allowed to believe in stuff like that, goddamn it.
Anyway, that was last season, that was A-ball. It’d been a long year, bridging the fake millennium.
Zito knew how to read a calendar properly, so he wasn’t confused, and on New Year’s, he got very drunk and half-panicked because 2000, this half-hour-old year, was the last year of the real millennium. So what was gonna happen next?
The world would end, it would have to. With all this buildup, it wouldn’t be fair to leave everyone hanging, apocalypse-free.
Zito giggled, and then got sad again. He lifted his plastic cup, a toast to the end of the world. Then he thanked God again for not killing his mother. He did that a couple of times a day.
It shouldn’t surprise him that his mother almost dying has stayed so prominent in his mind, but it kinda does. He started playing professional baseball at the same time. What’s the punchline behind that? Was God trying for an even-steven balance of misery and joy? That seems pretty fucking cruel.
In February of 1999, when everything began to go simultaneously right and wrong for him, Zito was still at USC, waiting for the baseball season to start.
Things got bad first, and it happened so quickly, Zito half-expected to hear cartoon sound effects.
There was the cirrhosis (ka-ZOW!), and the doctor gathering them all together to tell them that none of them had been donor matches (duunkt!), and Zito seeing his father with his face in his hands, weeping in the hospital hallway (shhrreeez).
Just before Zito left for Visalia, his mother, mostly delirious from both the pain and the painkillers, started talking to him as if he were her younger brother. It was a fair assumption; Zito’s uncle was his namesake, and the two of them would probably have shared things in common had not Barry the First wandered off into the wilderness back in the fifties and disappeared.
Zito’s mom petted his hair softly with her jaundiced hand, and kept saying, “I’m so glad you came home, Barry.” It creeped Zito the fuck out, but what could he say?
The smell of vindictively waxed floors and surgeons’ latex gloves, the room windows looking from the street like big illuminated playing cards pasted up on the side of the building, black rubber wheels on white linoleum, and a whole lot of awful stuff like that, but mainly this fear that Zito could feel pushing up under his skin, clotting in his veins.
That’s how he spent his spring.
But then there was that drive through the desert and the night spent fucking up his back in a hospital chair, his head on his dad’s shoulder. It was terrifically uncomfortable. At least his mom had pillows and bedding and the ability to relax her spine.
Zito’s hand was six inches away from one of his mom’s pillows when he realized what he was doing. He snapped back, darting his eyes around to make sure no one had seen, swallowing thickly. He felt so guilty for even thinking about his back right now, for even thinking of stealing one of his Dying Mother’s pillows (that’s what she was in his mind, capitalized, it was terrible), the worst son ever, that he immediately went to the gift shop and bought a Bible, the first he’d held in his hands in probably five years.
He read aloud until his eyes hurt, her favorite parts, legends and miracles, the Gospel According to John, and Zito heard his mom telling him, “John tells us about Jesus too, but a lot of it is a different story from the others. Probably it’s not as true. But it is more interesting.” Zito remembered being torn between knowing the truth and being kept entertained. He never could choose.
His dad dozed as Zito read, and woke up walleyed and jerking, chased by surreal dreams about martyrs and Thomas the apostle and fish big enough to swallow a man whole.
They said goodbye, but that was before. Early on, because they weren’t sure, they didn’t want to hesitate and miss their chance. Roberta couldn’t respond, but all of them said something, whispered into her ear as the rest of the family stood out of earshot across the room, huddled together. Sally didn’t sleep at all, and Bonnie didn’t wake up for so long that Zito started to get frantic, leaving bruises on her arms as he shook her and chanted her name.
They kept waiting, not asking the doctors questions anymore or talking to each other. They were just there, the four of them (the five of them, jesus, there were still five, you fucking hex), and Zito wondered, not for the first time, what his family had been like for those nine years between him and Sally. All the stuff he hadn’t been there for, the old family mythology and the exclusively-famous stories that his dad told sometimes to make the girls laugh at the memory, but Zito never quite got the jokes.
Also about how they hadn’t needed him, or missed him, or even noticed that he wasn’t there.
Zito couldn’t even imagine it; it looked like some other kid’s family. So he stopped trying, and closed his eyes, making baseballs rope and skitter and dance across the backs of his eyelids.
And then the sun came up, and there was this miracle.
Zito opened his eyes and saw the dawn resting gently on his mother’s face, saw her eyebrows pulling down slightly, chapped lips pressing together, and he thought absurdly, ‘man, I am totally out of carmex, gotta get to walgreens,’ before his mind came clear and he hollered to wake everyone up and show off his shaded, tired, wonderfully alive mom.
Roberta got through the night, the day, the week, the month. A donor match and a brand-new liver, fresh off the vine, came in July, and gave them room to base their conviction of total recovery on something more than prayer, something concrete and real that they could hold in their hands.
As his mother tried to make sense of the alien part from someone else’s body that was keeping her alive, Zito went back in Visalia, feeling like he was living in a movie or TV series or something, because since when did plot twists like this happen in real life?
*
--September 1999--
Two daughters, one son, and a husband, had their faith return to them like melted silver, cool and flawless sliding back into their hearts. Protected and watched over and constantly thanking God, and then Zito was in Class AA, and then he was in Canada, dizzy with the swiftness of his rise and holding his hands out to catch his balance.
North of the border, netted by the clean gray streets, Zito wished he could just sleep in his car, because he hadn’t lived anywhere longer than two months all season, and if he was gonna be a transient, he might as well just embrace it, go all out.
His car was so comfy and familiar, too. He could get a hotplate, plug it into the cigarette lighter. Engine-block eggs for breakfast, and a penlight held in his teeth so he could read at night without running the car battery down. Hang his legs out the window, seatbelt buckles digging into his back. Awesome.
But, not so much. His dad said flatly, “You’re not a hobo, Barry,” and forbade him from living in his car or a refrigerator box or under a highway overpass or anyplace fun. Zito checked into a hotel. A nice one, because only nice hotels leave you mints.
He chipped into his signing bonus to pay for it. The cost of the room did not make a dent, which was kind of unsettling.
It was true, that Zito’s signing bonus had freaked him out for awhile, and he kinda wanted to keep all of it in shoeboxes under his bed, the lids held on with rubber bands, just so it wouldn’t be some serious adult thing accumulating interest in a bank vault.
Then his sister Bonnie calculated (using, like, algebra and stuff), if he got the money changed into twenties, how many shoeboxes he would need to hold it all. When she told him the bed would basically have to be balanced on the pile of shoeboxes underneath, he tried to explain that he was all about the benjamins, a denomination both hardcore and space-saving, but she wouldn’t do the math again, just told him, “You’re rich. Get over it.” So he did.
Anyway. Mark Mulder was there, in Vancouver, at the tail-end of the summer when Zito showed up with just enough time to start and win one game, five hits and one earned run, and a Rivercats jersey with his name on the back waiting for him in Sacramento next spring.
Later, Zito would search for his first impression of Mulder, but he could never find it. Mulder was just there one day, on the edge of Zito’s awareness like a moth in the corner of the room, as if he’d always been there, unquestioned and immovable. In Zito’s mental visual archive, Mulder is always slouching like a teenager with his hands in his pockets, lips twisted like he’s about to spit on the ground.
Zito couldn’t remember the first time he’d seen Mulder pitch, either. He felt like he’d been born with that slider in his memory. And he couldn’t remember learning all the stuff he knew about Mulder. It just sort of got left in his brain at some point, familiarity through osmosis and forgetfulness. Of course, from the start he knew all the basics about Mulder. Or at least, the basics that were common knowledge.
He knew, as everyone in the system did, that Mulder was the golden boy, the chosen one, the future of the franchise, Oakland’s first pick in the ’98 draft and the second pick overall. Zito had heard all the old gnawing scouts elbow-to-elbow in the stands talking about Mulder’s ‘live arm,’ his ‘natural range,’ and his ‘good face,’ just like they’d talked about a million other guys, most of whom never came to shit.
Mulder was one of the few A’s prospects that other teams had actually been interested in. Though Zito had been drafted twice before, by the Mariners and the Rangers (he was destined for the AL West, it would appear), neither took him first round or offered him a respectable bonus. He waited until his college records got around, didn’t hear anybody talking about his live arm or his good face, and then Billy Beane came along and picked him up like a puppy from a cardboard box on the front porch. Well. Not exactly like that. It was business. Zito wasn’t free to a good home, he was just very very cheap, because no other team had realized the promise of his left arm.
Beane was trying to stop looking for talent with his eyes, Zito eventually figured out. Beane had data and formulas and Magoo-looking motherfuckers with degrees in computer science and a blissful love for baseball statistics. It was weird, a new kind of ballclub, but Zito couldn’t say anything, because nobody else wanted him, nobody else understood about Barry Zito and the course his life was gonna take. Not with that motion. Not with an out pitch that came direct from Little League.
Beane saw right through Zito, and all the ways in which Zito seemed the antithesis of a major league pitcher, because Beane wasn’t looking at Zito, he was looking at the lines in the box scores and radar gun readings, scowling at a printout while Zito was standing right in front of him. Billy Beane saw the numbers and the numbers were everything he needed to know.
When Zito showed Beane his curve for the first time, Beane just grunted dismissively and started talking about WHIP and the various colleges Zito had attended.
Something very strange was happening in Oakland, in that year of our Lord nineteen-hundred and ninety-nine. Especially in the farm system. Zito was sort of used to strange stuff going on, though, so he wasn’t too worried.
Mulder was the exact opposite. After being taken as the second overall pick, Mulder went straight to Triple-A, teleportation and serious holes left in his education. Mulder had been in Vancouver all summer, as Zito was ratcheting up through Visalia and Midland, collision-course aimed at each other.
Mulder’s numbers weren’t amazing, but his stuff made the coaches mumble out of the corners of their mouths about Tom Glavine and Steve Carlton. Mulder’s biggest problem was his control. Which was such a common concern in the minors, it practically had its own mascot.
If Zito thinks real hard about Triple-A in 1999, which was only a year ago and of which he should definitely have a clearer picture (but a lot has happened, so shut up), if he dregs up his memories of Mark Mulder in Canada, Zito usually sees a set of broad shoulders in a gray or maybe navy blue MSU T-shirt, and a pair of scuffed Adidas that were the only shoes in the clubhouse bigger than his own.
He’d heard some stories, about Mulder. Pranks and dares and revenge schemes that Zito would not have guessed from easy-going, order-two-pizzas-for-dinner-and-breakfast, videogame-playing Mulder. The stories didn’t even seem to be about the same guy-maybe the same seven guys, one for every day of the week.
Zito didn’t credit the gossip much, but maybe he was taking an interest in Mulder anyway. Zito kept trying to figure him out. In front of the Playstation, he was a thirteen year old boy-his voice would even crack when he got excited. In a bar, Mulder was so cool, you couldn’t melt ice on him, smirking like he could buy and sell everyone here, shooting his cuffs and turning his wrist so that the light hit the silver links of his watchband and made it glitter. With waitresses and supermarket cashiers, he found the tightrope between creepy and cute, and danced along it without even looking down. Everything he did, he did better than the rest of them, never even breaking a sweat. He was effortless.
Old people liked him. Small children liked him (they also had a tendency to come up to his knee and ask gape-mouthed, “Are you a giant, mister?” Mulder usually said yes, just because it was more fun that way). Umpires and opposing players liked him. Fans adored him, and the bright little crowd of Annies hovered around him with glitter on their eyelids and something wet painted on their mouths. Mulder was exactly what everyone wanted, all their individual wishes come true.
Before too long, Zito knew what to look for, how to gauge the differences in Mulder’s personality, his sense of humor, his choice of jokes to tell, everything. Sometimes there even seemed to be slight changes in his bone structure, in the color of his eyes, in the placement of the fortune lines on his palms. All of it depended on how many people were around, and who they were, if there were girls, or grown-ups, or ballplayers (and then, what kind of ballplayers? Utility men and relievers are not of the same species, much less same breed), and so on and so forth.
The topic of conversation might trigger something new. Zito was watching Mulder carefully one night as the suggestions for how to kill an hour were getting increasingly drunken and hazardous, something about rollerskate races down the raked aluminum roof of the storage shed at the ballpark, and he saw Mulder’s shoulders get somehow bigger, stretching like retractable wings, his eyes going pale and vaguely mocking like when he was being cool, his mouth small and taut, features set and his body held at the ready.
Maybe blood was in the air, adrenaline, the idea of risking everything for a three-second rush under the night sky. This Mulder scared Zito, but also kickstarted his pulse, made him feel young and brave and invincible.
By changing like this, fitting himself in wherever he was, Mulder somehow managed to be everyone’s ideal at the same time. It was remarkable. Close to enviable. But Zito would always remind himself of the basics of who Mulder was, the stuff that stayed the same. Mulder was very tall and very skinny and his hands could crush a person’s skull like a beer can. He threw seven pitches and could still name every man on the Chicago White Sox roster.
After a week of making a study of him, Zito got bored and gave up. He decided to just stay away from Mulder. Less confusing that way.
Zito was only in Vancouver for a couple of weeks, anyway. He was just happy that he had managed to learn his catcher’s name. He definitely didn’t have time for a guy who was too perfect to be trusted.
Tim Hudson had been through Vancouver too, earlier that season. He’d been up with the big club since June, and had spent the summer treating the American League like a bunch of fucking six-years-and-under T-ball teams.
Zito had never met him, and so received all his information about Hudson-quotes and testimonies and fuckin’-swear-this-is-true stories of the first couple months of the season-from his teammates. There was more than one night when fifteen or sixteen of them crammed into the cruddy little clubhouse lounge, perched on the busted couches, raptly watching the A’s claw through September, shaking enemies off their legs and roughly pushing their hair back under their caps. It was basically impossible to keep secrets, when they were seeing their big league futures play out like a vision, an omen.
Hudson would be on the mound on the television, or seen briefly in the dugout, grinning stupidly at everything, and somebody would say, “Hey, you remember that time when Tim-” invariably followed by something illegal or immoral or possibly both, often involving the scaling of a spread-armed tree or a fire escape. Hudson was apparently a sucker for a good view.
By the time the A’s were knocked out of the race, finishing in second place with blood on their faces and spat-out promises about next year, Zito realized that it was mostly Mulder starting those Tim Hudson stories. Zito didn’t think that meant anything, though.
It’s strange to think, later, a lot later, that that 1999 Vancouver team was the first time the three of them wore the same uniform in the same season. Of course, Zito and Hudson were never in the rotation together, and Zito avoided Mulder an awful lot, so it wasn’t like he should have been able to see what was coming.
*
--April-July 2000--
Mulder got to Oakland in April of the next year. Twenty-two years old, nine months older than Zito, an Irish-twin brother, and pitching in the big leagues. This after his first two starts in Sacramento that spring, when he allowed fifteen hits and eleven runs.
Zito began to suspect, at some point when the season was still so young that it shone like glass, that Mulder had managed to brainwash the entire Oakland ballclub into believing that he, Mulder, would be the savior of the team.
(It’s possible that Zito had been stoned when he came up with that; he continued to smoke on a semi-regular basis until he made the bigs, and then gave it up except for the off-season, national holidays, April 20th, his birthday, other peoples’ birthdays, and nights before off days if he’d struck out ten or more in his last outing, as a reward and incentive and means by which to make Cartoon Network even more hilarious than it usually was.)
Mulder hadn’t really pitched all that well in the minors, but his tour had been about three months shorter than Zito’s, who had pitched astonishingly well, and had to actually go through the bus leagues, unlike a certain spastic left-hander.
Zito figured Mulder must have just stood there with his shoulders and his legs and his tapered chest and stomach looking like a fucking Ken doll’s, tossing a baseball between his hands and grinning crookedly, without worry, working some kind of voodoo: I look like a classic pitcher. I look like I’m not afraid of the Yankees. I am what you have been waiting for.
It was like a Jedi mind trick or something. A season and two games in Triple-A, a nifty little 4.70 ERA for his professional baseball career, and Mark Mulder was pitching in the rotation behind Tim Hudson like he’d been born there, leaning against Hudson in the dugout and smiling pretty for the camera. Mulder was made for cameras. National television coverage. SportsCenter highlights.
It must have been a scam. Zito thinks sometimes he even fell for it himself, once he got to Oakland after the All-Star break, and started seeing it all in living color. It was hard to ignore. Mark Mulder at full-force, whichever Mark Mulder you liked best. Mark Mulder would win you over, eventually, because winning was just what the son of a bitch did.
This was when Mulder was a rookie too, six and a half feet tall, a hundred and ninety pounds soaking wet and carrying rolls of quarters in his pockets, his hair buzzed so short on the sides you could see scalp. He slouched a lot and talked with his mouth full and would wear the same rank T-shirt for days on end until one of the guys stole it for the good of the team.
Mulder wasn’t all that good-looking, not as cool as he liked to think, and all the custom-made versions of himself were watered-down, forgeries of the real thing, kind of irritating, kind of compulsive, kind of pathetic. But nobody else seemed to realize it, and Mulder was still traveling with a crowd.
Zito kept squinting and trying to figure it out, what Mulder had that lit him up like a porch light and drew everyone in. Zito tried to follow the trend, tried to convince himself that Mulder was hot, and cool, and funny, and all the things he pretended to be, but usually it didn’t work. Soon enough, though, a year or two, Mulder would be worth a second look, that was evident.
When Mulder filled out and his elbows didn’t double as fucking Ginsu knives; when his shoulders straightened up and became lined with muscle and he stopped slumping to hide his height, kept his head up; when he let his hair grow down just to the tips of his ears, and maybe scruffed up his face a bit with a dirty blonde five o’clock shadow; when he would be in the weight room four days a week and Zito would be able to watch him getting stronger and better, the streamlined movement of his back at the row machine, and his arms pulled out like airplane wings, his straight lines making him a cross and his bare chest making him the one to be crucified, sweat on his face and neck, finally living up to the promise of his frame and.
Fuck.
See, that was why. Stuff like that. Just idly looking over at Mulder and thinking about how he wasn’t all that good, way overrated, and then suddenly Zito’s mind was halfway to getting Mulder stripped naked and bent over the fucking weight bench.
Zito wondered if there was something in that cologne Mulder used sometimes, pheromones or something, and then sighed. Hopeless.
Mulder could fuck up the entire summer and sink the team as only a terrified punk-kid pitcher can do, all his pitches staying up or hanging right over the middle of the plate, the batters jumping out of the way of wild pitches and the nervous guy in the elephant suit casting distrustful glances from on top of the dugout.
Mulder could ruin them epically, unforgivably, but then, after the game, he could walk in from the showers with a towel around his slatted waist, flip-flops slapping the cement, and nothing else, his skin damp and red from the heat. He was the only man in the world who could honest-to-god motherfucking strut while wearing only a towel and flip-flops, rolling his shoulders back and skimming a hand over his hair.
Part of it, Zito acknowledged, was the specificity of his giveaways, his tells. Mulder’s left hand was slightly paler from being hidden in his glove all the time, and his ears cocked out a bit from being jammed by a cap every day of his life. There were chafed places of the backs of his arms from the dugout bench, and a bruise over his hipbone from a comebacker during infield practice. The faint impression of the stitches wasn’t visible from across the room, but if a person got closer, by whatever means necessary, they could see it like a brand on Mulder’s skin, the curve of the stitches matching the curve of Mulder’s hipbone as if it’d been designed for that very purpose.
All these abstruse clues, clear solid proof that this guy was a ballplayer, a major leaguer and as incurable as any of them. And of course there was nothing more corrupting and addictive than a serious ballplayer. At least, there wasn’t if you were Barry Zito.
sigh.
*
--September 2000--
And the scam has been kept up, all season long, until Zito wants to shake someone, crack his hand across their faces, snap the fuck out of it.
But Mark Mulder can still fool every one of them, even Rick Peterson, even Billy Beane. The spitting image of Elite Young Pitcher. Or at least, the Elite Young Pitcher: Larval Stage. The possibilities in Mark Mulder, they make Zito’s throat close up. Nothing to prove it yet. Hardly anything to even argue it. But there you go.
Mulder’s got as much potential as anyone Zito’s ever seen, that’s true. But for some reason Zito keeps thinking of him as a cautionary tale waiting to happen. A spook story for little pitchers to keep them quiet before bed: Once upon a time, Mark Mulder could have been as good as anyone ever has been, but no one made him work for it and he got lazy, let his mechanics go and skipped out on bullpen sessions, eventually lost his touch for the game, and then he went insane, and ran off into the woods alone.
Zito grins slightly, whispers to himself, “And he was never heard from again.”
He’s watching Mulder struggle through the fourth, two on and no outs and the heart of the order stalking around the front of the visitors’ dugout. Zito’s feeling pretty good.
The thing about Zito, remember, is that he doesn’t look like how pitchers are supposed to look. And he knows that, he’s made his peace. He wouldn’t want to look like Mulder, anyway, not for a million. Well. Maybe his eyes, because blue is a good color on Zito, but that’s it.
Here on the bench with his tailbone grinding painfully no matter how he shifts around, and Zito’s been waiting for this his whole life. He’s thinking about the scouts and coaches and agents, back when he was in high school and just starting college, who never even gave him a decent shot. They took one look and turned away. Zito was just some kid who hadn’t grown into his hands or feet yet, with dilated pupils and unwashed hair brushing his shirt collar. He had that parody of a delivery and those three goofy harmless pitches, so he can understand why they were skeptical.
His understanding of their doubt is abstract, of course. It’s academic. Because, throughout his life, Zito has learned nothing as well as he has learned that he is good enough at this game to go all the way. To go as far as he wants.
His dad was telling him that before Zito could properly form all his consonants. Randy Jones told him that when Zito was practicing cursing at the park and pounding his fist into his glove, eyeing the plug of chewing tobacco sticking up out of Jones’s back pocket and trying to figure out if he even wanted some, much less wanted some enough to ask for it. And his mom, who had always believed in a lot of things and made up her own prayers, had said to him once, “You are worth every day that we waited for you.”
Zito has heard this stuff all his life. And everything he’s ever done has substantiated it, too. It’s never been challenged, not seriously, never been any real threat to the implacable theory of how good he is. Zito’s charmed life is evidence of a God who actually has his back-and it’s all the proof Zito needs.
It’s not his fault that he believes the obvious. He won’t be at all surprised if someday a total stranger comes up to him on the street and says, “hey, you are a fucking amazing pitcher.”
Everyone he has ever trusted has told him that. And he can read his own stats. He knows that no matter what they want to say about his unorthodox delivery or how hitters will figure out the curve from Zito’s arm angle by their third at-bat, no matter what they say-Zito wins baseball games. He wins them all the time. He always has, for as long as he can remember. It’s what he does best, the one thing he has always been able to do.
Which is one of the reasons that Zito isn’t worried about the slip in his velocity, coming down the stretch, here on the bench on the twelfth day of September. His change-up is still ten to fifteen miles slower than the heat, depending on what kind of razors are in his eyes that day, and ten-fifteen is more than enough difference to make them look stupid. He’ll take it easy before his next start, maybe rack it up a few notches, but it’s no big deal.
And the deuce is still the deuce. Just like it’s been since Zito learned it at seven years old, and Zito is used to it by now, it hardly ever takes him by surprise anymore. Everybody else, on the other hand.
(an interlude-1990)
One time, back home in San Diego when he was maybe twelve, he’d been messing around in the front yard, throwing his curve to amuse himself, hooking it into the dead-center of the oak tree’s trunk. He was doing real good, each time he spun it off his fingers and pushed over with his thumb, it looped and dove and went right where he wanted it, something more flown than thrown.
He heard a gasp as he released another one, then a small falling-thumping noise, and Zito turned. There was a woman collapsed on the sidewalk, groceries scattered and oranges rolling into the gutter, her small curled hand looking salt-pale on the asphalt.
Zito left his mitt and ball on the grass, ran and got his dad, and the lady was fine, of course, maybe heatstroke or exhaustion or something like that, but she was just fine, sitting at their kitchen table sipping lemonade and holding a cool washcloth to her forehead.
She apologized a lot for being such trouble, and rubbed her temples, Zito’s dad patting her arm comfortingly, and Zito had to fight down his grin, because it wasn’t heatstroke and it wasn’t exhaustion.
She’d seen him throw his curveball, or maybe even just the ball after it’d left his hand, dropping out of nowhere on a flight path that appeared to break about twenty-seven laws of physics, and the way sometimes the curve looked remote controlled, or even kind of scary, if you saw it at the right moment, slicing like a knife, when it was a fist-sized white weapon with red markings-the Soviets!
It’s a new technology, pocket-sized destruction. Zito’s eyes got a bit wider; he could see it all.
The next frontier, pitcher-soldiers, infielders parachuting in, catchers stuffed into fighter jets. An impossible kind of war that’ll be fought with sliders and knuckleballs and cutters. The Siege of Yankee Stadium. The Invasion of Sandy Koufax’s Curveball. Scarred battlefields littered with dead baseballs and settled black smoke, waiting for someone to come and clean the burned earth, roll out the foul lines again and stomp the bases into the ground. Incredible.
Somewhere between the futuristic death-toys of the communists, and the flagrantly surreal hook of the ball, the lady’s mind had folded in and she’d passed out from the sheer brilliance of it. Zito knew it for sure.
Zito thought for awhile about Saul being struck blind on the road to Damascus. And also about his own gangly pre-adolescent legs trembling when Kirk Gibson slammed that home run to win Game 1, Zito’s awareness that if he hadn’t been sitting at that moment, he would have fallen. He looked at his hands on the kitchen table, still too big for him, ugly hands with prodding knuckles and torn-up nails, but he knocked someone out today, with these hands, this one in particular, the marked hand.
It was power, probably, that thick hot feeling in his chest, a vague sense of reeling around drunkenly. Power from these huge stupid-looking hands. The ability to make people fall down and spill their groceries. Any kind of power, though, Zito didn’t really care. Any kind.
*
--September 2000--
Hudson’s down at the other end of the dugout, snickering with Menechino, both their heads bowed inwards. Zito has noticed people looking from him to Hudson to Mulder recently, though in no particular order, just one after the other after the other. He knows the three of them are supposed to be . . . something. The what hasn’t yet been made clear to him. But it’s supposed to be pretty good, whatever it is.
Zito’s had a hell of a debut. Not yet two full months in the majors, and his ERA is under three after nine starts. His last outing, he pitched a five-hit, complete-game shutout, every microscopic piece of the universe clicking easily into place just for him.
He had pulled off his cap so he could tip it to the overjoyed crowd, and felt his hair drawn free from under his jersey, feeling the breeze on the nape of his neck and deciding abruptly that he’s a major leaguer now, and he’s going to get a goddamn haircut.
Right then, though, on the field with the full nine innings resting so-far-comfortably in the muscles of his shoulders and back, there was a chance that that was as happy as Zito’s ever been. More even than when Zito had held his mom’s hand as the doctor walked briskly into her hospital room with a big ole wedge of a grin on his papery face, and the name of a matching donor on his clipboard.
On the bench, in the dugout, in the fucking here and now (focus, man, jesus), Zito is watching Mulder pitch, and keeping Hudson in his peripheral vision, on the look-out for quick movements and attacks from the side. Three people is probably better than two, Zito thinks. If one of them gets cracked over the head with a bar stool, there’s still the other to watch his back. Better odds with higher numbers. Yeah.
The inning finally ends and Mulder comes in with his eyes on the ground, lagging behind the rest of the team, even the outfielders. Mulder sits down next to Zito and whips off his cap, drags on his warm-up jacket. Mulder doesn’t look frustrated or scared or anything like that. That would fuck up his image.
Zito remembers, well, he remembers something and he’s not sure, because it was really weird, and he kind of felt like he was dreaming or sleepwalking or something, though it didn’t happen while he was asleep. That would be too simple an excuse.
*
--April 2000--
Something about Mulder’s last night in Sacramento, however many months and major league baseball games ago that was, because Mulder had gotten word from the Oakland front office during the sixth inning, and was gonna drive to the East Bay tomorrow morning while the rest of them were gathering at the yard.
Mulder was going out with a bunch of the guys, farewell and good luck and let’s get drunk, that sort of thing, but before that, there was the west wall of the stadium.
And how Zito had pushed out through the side door with his bag slung over his shoulder, and caught a glimpse of red shirt in the corner of his eye, vanishing around the edge of the building. Zito ducked around the corner because he was fucking nosy and he wanted to know which Mulder was out here.
Mulder was there leaning against the west wall, which was smooth red-orange brick, no door or anything interesting, not even a dumpster or a gulch back there. Mulder was looking at the sky. That’s all there was to look at.
Zito, well, it’s hard to say. It probably had something to do with Mulder going to the Show, getting that much closer to becoming everything he could be. That’s sounded like a good, believable reason. Something Zito could tell his therapist.
But also it was just Mulder, and he was a straight line, his body acutely angled. Shoulders resting on the wall, chest-stomach-legs like a single board of wood. A plank, if ‘plank’ didn’t have all those pirate connotations. But Mulder looked so uncomplicated, right then, a long slender backslash against the west wall and no surprises, totally self-explanatory. Zito licked his lips, looking at Mulder’s neck. Maybe an incline, something to get your hands braced on and climb like a tree.
There was probably movement, and definitely contact, and it’s a good bet that Zito lost a button or two and Mulder bit his own lip to bleeding. The details come and go like a flipbook with pages missing.
Zito remembers pressing his hand down flat to Mulder’s chest, sliding it southward and whispering in Mulder’s ear, “maybe they’ll fucking feed you out there, huh?” as Mulder’s ribs through his shirt made lean pipe-like dents across his palm.
He also remembers Mulder laughing through his nose at one point, muttering, “stupid fucker,” but Zito’s not sure what he did to incur that. Maybe he shut Mulder up, then. Maybe he did it the only way he knew how.
Probably the reason it’s so foggy in his mind is because Zito’s one overriding awareness, throughout the whole thing, was that Mulder wasn’t pushing him away. Thirty seconds in, when Mulder tilted his head curiously and ran the tip of his tongue over Zito’s lips, it was already in huge Vegas-bright letters in his mind: HE IS NOT PUSHING YOU AWAY. Sick blood-red neon and blinking on and off spasmodically. Weird thing to imagine.
Zito’s shoulder was propped on the west wall, so he ended up with all this red-orangey dust on his shirt. He tried to swipe it off, but it just smeared into tiger stripes. Mulder still didn’t push him away, no matter what Zito tried to do to him, no matter where his hands or mouth went. It made Zito wish they were somewhere a bit more horizontal, then he got angry and disappointed and bitter all at the same time.
The good thing about not being drunk was that Zito would definitely remember this, and Mulder would have no excuse to claim he didn’t want it, though he would probably try to anyway. The bad thing was that Zito was sharp enough to realize, even as it happened, that this was one-time only.
Temporary insanity. Getting called up to the Show will do that to a person. As for Zito, well, maybe Mulder drove him crazy while Zito wasn’t paying attention. It could have happened. Then Mulder closed his teeth on Zito’s earlobe, and rucked up his shirt so Mulder could find skin and other exciting things.
Zito would have thought, ‘ah, fuck it,’ but to tell the truth, he wasn’t really thinking of anything, except a fervent wish that Mulder knew the reciprocation rule, because fuck if Zito was gonna tear up his knees for a handjob.
Mulder was so bony it kinda hurt. Zito would be finding bruises in strange places for a week. The side of his neck, near his jaw. The inside of his arm. His collarbones, both of them, looking painted by ash. Zito was on his knees with his hands pulling at Mulder’s belt but not undoing it yet, and when he pressed his face to Mulder’s stomach, he got a rib in his forehead and a hipbone against his neck, but it was warm too, and tasted good, something he should probably memorize.
Mulder was gonna be damn hot someday, Zito finally admitted, biting the hollow of Mulder’s hip and pushing his hands up Mulder’s chest. Once he grows his hair out some, that’ll definitely help.
Zito chanced a look up and Mulder was staring down at him, looking stunned. His eyes were overly bright, making Zito worry about gas leaks for a second of patented Zito-nonsense, but then Mulder’s face did something, something odd. His jaw tightened but his forehead was swept clear. The corners of his eyes turned down, and the tense knot of his mouth came free. The tendon in his neck relaxed. His eyelids closed halfway, looking smoky and so fucking chill, and Zito didn’t even care about his knees anymore.
Mulder smiled, just barely, so that it was more like the abstract theory of a smile than anything, and Zito realized what this was. Who this was.
“Mark, god,” Zito tried to say, but no sound came out.
He’d been wrong, man. Mulder wasn’t gonna be hot, some way far off day when Zito had already stopped paying attention to him. Mulder was already there, this Mulder, jesus, and Zito was sort of babbling in his head, something about how this Mulder is the best Mulder and all the Mulders should be like this Mulder, because this Mulder is fuckin’ hot, when Mulder gave him a patiently (and, what? Mark Mulder, patient? What next, Barry Zito, Republican?) exasperated look, and curved his fingers around Zito’s jaw, his ear, the back of his head, tugging him back and arching his hips off the wall when Zito touched him again.
Zito was thinking maybe Mulder didn’t even have to get him back. You get a chance to blow the (all-of-a-fucking-sudden) hottest guy in the league (either league!), you just keep your head down (heh) and do your best not to freak him out.
Turned out Zito needn’t have worried. He used his hands and his throat and Mulder slammed up and out, his head whacking back against the brick. Zito stood and spit the taste out of his mouth, hiking Mulder’s shorts back up. Mulder was slumped against the wall with his eyes closed, breathing deep and Zito’s shoulder was against his chest for support, and then he suddenly wasn’t, he’d vanished, he’d dropped to his fucking knees, easy as that.
Zito gaped and brushed fingers across Mulder’s face, hissing, “Fuck,” to see him down there. Mulder grinned up at him, friendly charming grin and nothing like the slow, sleepy look Mulder had shown him earlier, but Zito thought maybe this was really Mulder too. Shit, maybe all of them were real.
Zito’s head spun. He held onto Mulder’s for balance, sliding his hands over the army-cut and imagining the hippie/crewcut picture the two of them must be making, the Poor Homesick Navy Boy led astray into careless hedonism by the Long-Haired Probably-Communist Queer, and that was funny enough to make him snort into his arm and bite down on his wrist. Then Zito pictured Mulder’s mouth opening, Mulder sucking on his lips to make them all tender and debauched, and Zito remembered that he didn’t actually have to imagine anything, not right now.
Zito took his arm off his face and looked down. Mulder’s mouth was open, that wasn’t a dream. It was circled and just waiting, so Zito scratched at Mulder’s head and made pushy high-pitched noises to the effect of, ‘please suck me off as soon as is humanly possible thank you.’
Mulder slanted a glance up at him, and Mulder’s hand moved slowly, almost absent-mindedly. Zito was shaking and soon enough he’d beg, which was probably what Mulder wanted anyway. Mulder’s mouth was still open, perfect circle. And he caught Zito’s gaze, and Mulder smiled with his ready mouth, winked at him, and got to it.
Zito’s knees almost gave out.
After Zito’d finished off and Mulder had gotten to his feet again, Zito leaning against him and panting shallowly, Mulder twisted his whole hand in Zito’s hair, not pulling or stroking, just holding there like maybe his hand had gotten cold and why let the hippie hair go to waste? It was kind of disconcerting, Mulder’s hand wound in his hair. Zito wondered if Mulder could touch both of his ears with one hand, then decided he probably could.
Mulder’s hand in Zito’s hair, was it possible that this was the weirdest thing that had happened tonight?
They moved away from the wall together, but then Zito turned and Mulder was gone. Not even a puff of smoke left behind. Lucky bastard. Zito wished he could disappear too, just like that, it wasn’t fair to just go off and leave him alone, really it wasn’t.
Zito had no idea how long that biz-fuckin’-arre interlude against the west wall had lasted or where Mulder went afterwards or, really, where he himself had gone, because the next thing he remembered was waking up in the morning, shirtless and wearing only one sock, on the linoleum floor of his tiny hotel room kitchen.
Mulder had taken off for Oakland by then, of course, leaving Zito to kick his suitcase around the room and not think about all the stuff that he didn’t know. The temporary insanity had worn off and now he was mostly just sick. He carried an empty brown paper grocery bag around with him, just in case.
And no matter how much he tried not to, he kept hearing questions, really basic terrible stuff that got screamed until the voice inside his mind cracked and got all hoarse. Like, for instance-WHAT? And-WHY? And, his own personal favorite-THE FUCK?
For the sentimental sort in the audience, there was a dim hopeful voice, too, pestering insistently at the back of Zito’s mind-‘hey man we’re gonna keep doing this, you’re not done with me, right?’-but Zito wasn’t hearing that in any sort of conscious way. Wouldn’t have done him much good, even if he was paying attention. Can’t ask that question of a guy who was no longer in the fucking county.
There was confusion and shock and pissed-offedness, as would be expected, and also some totally futile regrets that Mulder didn’t mention he liked dick sooner than the night before he left. Jesus, it woulda made Canada so much more fun.
Zito pretty much didn’t know anything. He was fairly sure it was his fault, but he remembered Mulder not pushing him away, though he’d had a million chances and had gotten down on his knees without Zito even lifting an eyebrow, so.
Zito sat down on the floor, his head in his hands. Mulder was in the major leagues and Zito had to get to the ballpark in a half an hour. His life couldn’t get fucked up, not right now.
Zito went out to the yard, and kept on pitching better than Mark Mulder, and never got any of his questions answered, but he did get called up in July. His mom was there for his first start. Mulder was in the dugout, watching him like a scientist, like Zito was a bug. Zito just pitched. All he could do.
*
--September 2000--
And, now it’s September again, isn’t it. Another baseball season three weeks from done, and then everything will change just like it always does. Zito looks at Mulder and blows out a breath. Mulder has never answered any of Zito’s questions about what happened that night. Of course, Zito’s never actually got it up to ask them. Still.
Whatever. Not everything has to be a learning experience.
The only thing Zito knows about what happened the night Mulder got called up is that they have not spoken of it since.
Mulder’s sitting next to him, and they’re both major league pitchers now. Mulder never looks scared, that’s the thing. Never shows it, no matter which man he’s trying to be. None of Mulder’s versions of himself ever get frightened. That’s what kills Zito.
Mulder’s not really blessed, he just looks it. So he’s got no cause to act like he’s so fucking unafraid. Zito never gets seen for what he is, because he looks like a flake and a burnout and the fucking leech who sleeps on the couch for six months without even offering to chip in on the rent, all the things Zito might have been, in another world, a baseball-less existence.
But fuck what other people think when they size him up. The truth is, Zito’s the blessed one. He can tell by his stats, and by the season and a half that took him from Class A to being twenty-two years old and in the starting rotation of a contending team. He can tell by the way he has loved baseball for the entirety of his life, and he is as good at the game as most everyone in the world (or at least, he will be, someday). Nobody gets that lucky. Talent and passion at the same time? It’s not really fair.
He can also tell by the fact that he’ll call his mom tonight and they’ll talk about old stuff and new stuff and silly stuff and pretty much anything. The only word that fit what happened was the word ‘miracle.’ So that’s what they use.
His whole family has been wandering around for the past year like they’re shell-shocked, beaming and laughing a lot. And Zito, on the bench, in the clubhouse, against the west wall, with his new faith around him like an old worn-soft jacket, faith in himself and whatever it was that saved his mother and whatever it is that will save him. He is being kept safe, and he believes this with all his heart. That means it’s true.
Zito can’t say that to Mulder, though. Mulder already thinks he’s crazy. Mulder is next to him, gazing at the field with his eyes unfocused. Zito can see Hudson, all the way down the line of the bench. Mulder’s profile is fuzzy, then Hudson’s is, switching as Zito shifts his focus. He does that for awhile, until Mulder kicks his foot and says, “Knock it off.”
Zito grins at him. Mulder can play at being perfect, he can pretend to be the best pitcher of all time even though he’s almost a full season in and two games under .500. Mulder can imagine himself untouched, and above the petty drama of the world, and totally in control.
Mulder can also make believe that he’s not gay or doesn’t really want to fuck Zito, but Zito’s pretty sure Mulder is the one who will end up the more fucked up by this, because Zito doesn’t have that kind of bad karma shadowing him, waiting for the opportunity to kick him in the shins and run away.
It’s a fine diversion, and a free country, so Mulder can go ahead and pretend whatever he wants, then call Zito the crazy one. Whatever. Zito decided awhile ago that he does not need Mark Mulder, and will not ever need him, and that’s the kind of promise he keeps.
Zito’s got the life Mulder wishes he could have. Impossible, but true. Because Zito has been blessed, and Mulder would rather be lucky than good. It took Zito a long time to figure that out, but he got it eventually.
If he wants, if he thinks it’ll help, Mulder can even imagine a thin gold light all around his body that keeps him sheltered and dry.
It doesn’t matter. Nothing in this game is what you think it is. And Zito’s happy to keep it that way, keep his luck to himself until someone breaks his fingers prying them off, because Zito’s never been too good at sharing.
Shouldn’t be too hard. He’s got a hell of a poker face, and he lies as easily as he breathes. He is a pitcher, after all.
Zito winks at Mulder and Mulder gives him a strange look. Zito can still feel Mulder’s teeth on his stomach, and Zito thinks, ‘you just had to fuck with me, didn’t you.’
Three weeks left in their first year as big leaguers, and Mulder and Zito are knee-to-knee on the bench, Mulder staring off at left-center field as if there’s something more than just a wall out there.
Zito carefully shifts and slides and subtly angles until he can lightly hook his index finger in Mulder’s belt loop. Mulder doesn’t notice, caught up in whatever the fuck’s going on in his head. Zito grins, the big grin with lots of teeth that makes him look kind of like a wolf. He’s scared toddlers with it before, so he knows it works.
Zito tugs Mulder’s belt loop, and starts figuring out how bad he’ll have to fuck Mulder up before they’re even.
THE END
okay i have to go now. get some sleep; the game's not until five o'clock.
in the meantime, someone help me, i've been totally won over by roger clemens. i hate it when that happens.
also. i found this today, and um.
this was written last year, last summer. like, how i wrote 'el rey' in one night while seriously fucked up? wrote this the next night, the same state of affairs except another day of not having slept tacked atop it. so. i didn't think it was any good. but then i found it and it's really weird and the timeline is all sorts of complicated, but it's, like. strange-creepy-cool. capturing the delicate insanity of barry zito--apparently all you need is some speed. who knew!
just to clear it up a bit:
1999-Zito went from A-ball in Visalia to AAA Vancouver in four months. Mulder started the year in AAA, along with Tim Hudson, who was called up in June of that year.
2000-Mulder and Zito both started out in AAA Sacramento. Mulder went up at the end of April, Zito in July. Zito had nothing if not earned his ascent. Mulder, not so much, but we're willing to forgive him. Mostly.
again. fucked up story.
See Right Through
By Candle Beck
--September 2000--
Nobody looks at Zito twice, because when he comes up in 2000, he’s all of twenty-two years old, and, first off, he’s got a cross-body motion and more of a leg-kick than a fucking Rockette, and, secondly, he couldn’t break ninety-two miles per hour if you put a gun to his head.
By September, his fastball is down to eighty-eight, eighty-seven. Eighty-six in the later innings if he’s trying to go the distance. Eighty-five if he lied about being sore and tired when the trainers asked. But, eighty-seven is a fair average.
Everyone other than Zito seems surprised by Zito’s success. Eighty-seven mile per hour fastball. You see harder throws than that at those midway booths down on the Boardwalk, with the radar gun and if you can guess how hard you’re throwing, you win a stuffed Tigger or a pirate hat or something.
No one can figure out how this kid has come all the way through the minors and so quickly, into the chaos of his first pennant race, when all he’s got is a (slow) fastball, and (hittable) change, and a curveball that most everyone thinks is some sort of trick at first, peering for the invisible track that guided it down, checking for strings tied to the stitches.
There’s no trick. No strings, or tracks, or scuffmarks. No Vaseline under his cap brim, no strip of sandpaper inside his mitt, or any the other shit various paranoid people have accused him of. It can get pretty fucking obnoxious, but Zito’s a laidback kinda guy.
He just doesn’t look like he should be this good, that’s all. He doesn’t have the right face for baseball, so they don’t believe he can really do what he does. But that’s not Zito’s problem. It’s a problem localizing in his general area, but other people put it there, so they can be suspicious and blind and blame him for his face, and it’s got nothing to do with him. All Zito is here to do is pitch.
It’s been just about fifteen months since he was drafted. Last year he left USC a week before classes ended, and lit out for Visalia, the car radio volume up so high he blew out a speaker. Now everything sounds lopsided.
He went from Class A to AA to AAA in four months. Minor league baseball went so quickly, the edges blurred. The Oakland A’s were broke and dying for young pitching (and very little has changed), and they didn’t wait to see if he was a fluke.
This kind of thing is bound to happen.
*
--February-June 1999--
Sometime in the first half of his minor league year, Zito’s mom almost died.
A bad summer’s day with the cotton-scrap of the moon in the dull blue sky, looking parched and lifeless and eerie, and the doctor at Cedar Sinai in Los Angeles told Zito’s father and sisters to make the most of the few hours Roberta Zito had left.
That night, with the fucking moon trailing him every foot of the way, Zito sped through the Central Valley, still half-dressed in his uniform, his jersey crumpled in the backseat and his plain white undershirt sweat-soaked in a T shape between his shoulder blades and down his spine.
He was crying, the windows all the way down, and his hair lashing into his face, getting damp at the ends because he was sobbing, okay, that’s what he was doing. Face sand-burned, eyes too wide and his nose running, wiped messily on the back of his arm after he’d emptied the glove compartment of its paper napkins.
His dad had called just after the game, and said, in a voice that was all choked-off and tinged with a sharp violent undertone of denial, that she wasn’t expected to survive the night. Zito stood at the clubhouse payphone, smashed paper cups under his feet, staring at the hardened pieces of gum stuck to the wall.
Ten minutes later, he was on the highway and driving south very fast, because his mother was dying, she’d been dying all spring in minutes and breaths, silently watching the grass turn bright again out her hospital room window.
Zito was having visions, premonitions, of his first major league start, his first trip to the postseason, the perfect game he would someday hurl, all the stuff that was gonna happen to him, all the new stories he would have. And he could see the empty space between his father and oldest sister in the stands above the dugout as they cheered for him.
But space is the wrong word, because even if his dad and sister were scrunched together close enough to lose buttons in each other’s pockets, even then, the empty spot would be there. It wasn’t space, not a physical expanse where his mother once was and is no more. Nothing so bold. It wasn’t real heartbreak, but more like an aortic valve opened (and this valve was not the thing from medical textbooks, but the thing on bicycle wheels, sticking out of his heart), and a certain amount of air let out, leaving his heart a bit deflated, and frail, and heavier. An opened heart, and the opposite of space.
And that was all it would be, really. It’s just, it would be a lack. An absence. It was going to make an echoey sound at every happy moment Zito would have for the rest of his life. He could see all this so clearly.
He was still a hundred miles away, crying till it felt like drowning, hysterically convinced that if he could just get there in time, before his mother stopped being anything but a thought, if he could get there before it was too late, this day could still be saved (somehow).
It’s okay. Zito was twenty years old, and still allowed to believe in stuff like that, goddamn it.
Anyway, that was last season, that was A-ball. It’d been a long year, bridging the fake millennium.
Zito knew how to read a calendar properly, so he wasn’t confused, and on New Year’s, he got very drunk and half-panicked because 2000, this half-hour-old year, was the last year of the real millennium. So what was gonna happen next?
The world would end, it would have to. With all this buildup, it wouldn’t be fair to leave everyone hanging, apocalypse-free.
Zito giggled, and then got sad again. He lifted his plastic cup, a toast to the end of the world. Then he thanked God again for not killing his mother. He did that a couple of times a day.
It shouldn’t surprise him that his mother almost dying has stayed so prominent in his mind, but it kinda does. He started playing professional baseball at the same time. What’s the punchline behind that? Was God trying for an even-steven balance of misery and joy? That seems pretty fucking cruel.
In February of 1999, when everything began to go simultaneously right and wrong for him, Zito was still at USC, waiting for the baseball season to start.
Things got bad first, and it happened so quickly, Zito half-expected to hear cartoon sound effects.
There was the cirrhosis (ka-ZOW!), and the doctor gathering them all together to tell them that none of them had been donor matches (duunkt!), and Zito seeing his father with his face in his hands, weeping in the hospital hallway (shhrreeez).
Just before Zito left for Visalia, his mother, mostly delirious from both the pain and the painkillers, started talking to him as if he were her younger brother. It was a fair assumption; Zito’s uncle was his namesake, and the two of them would probably have shared things in common had not Barry the First wandered off into the wilderness back in the fifties and disappeared.
Zito’s mom petted his hair softly with her jaundiced hand, and kept saying, “I’m so glad you came home, Barry.” It creeped Zito the fuck out, but what could he say?
The smell of vindictively waxed floors and surgeons’ latex gloves, the room windows looking from the street like big illuminated playing cards pasted up on the side of the building, black rubber wheels on white linoleum, and a whole lot of awful stuff like that, but mainly this fear that Zito could feel pushing up under his skin, clotting in his veins.
That’s how he spent his spring.
But then there was that drive through the desert and the night spent fucking up his back in a hospital chair, his head on his dad’s shoulder. It was terrifically uncomfortable. At least his mom had pillows and bedding and the ability to relax her spine.
Zito’s hand was six inches away from one of his mom’s pillows when he realized what he was doing. He snapped back, darting his eyes around to make sure no one had seen, swallowing thickly. He felt so guilty for even thinking about his back right now, for even thinking of stealing one of his Dying Mother’s pillows (that’s what she was in his mind, capitalized, it was terrible), the worst son ever, that he immediately went to the gift shop and bought a Bible, the first he’d held in his hands in probably five years.
He read aloud until his eyes hurt, her favorite parts, legends and miracles, the Gospel According to John, and Zito heard his mom telling him, “John tells us about Jesus too, but a lot of it is a different story from the others. Probably it’s not as true. But it is more interesting.” Zito remembered being torn between knowing the truth and being kept entertained. He never could choose.
His dad dozed as Zito read, and woke up walleyed and jerking, chased by surreal dreams about martyrs and Thomas the apostle and fish big enough to swallow a man whole.
They said goodbye, but that was before. Early on, because they weren’t sure, they didn’t want to hesitate and miss their chance. Roberta couldn’t respond, but all of them said something, whispered into her ear as the rest of the family stood out of earshot across the room, huddled together. Sally didn’t sleep at all, and Bonnie didn’t wake up for so long that Zito started to get frantic, leaving bruises on her arms as he shook her and chanted her name.
They kept waiting, not asking the doctors questions anymore or talking to each other. They were just there, the four of them (the five of them, jesus, there were still five, you fucking hex), and Zito wondered, not for the first time, what his family had been like for those nine years between him and Sally. All the stuff he hadn’t been there for, the old family mythology and the exclusively-famous stories that his dad told sometimes to make the girls laugh at the memory, but Zito never quite got the jokes.
Also about how they hadn’t needed him, or missed him, or even noticed that he wasn’t there.
Zito couldn’t even imagine it; it looked like some other kid’s family. So he stopped trying, and closed his eyes, making baseballs rope and skitter and dance across the backs of his eyelids.
And then the sun came up, and there was this miracle.
Zito opened his eyes and saw the dawn resting gently on his mother’s face, saw her eyebrows pulling down slightly, chapped lips pressing together, and he thought absurdly, ‘man, I am totally out of carmex, gotta get to walgreens,’ before his mind came clear and he hollered to wake everyone up and show off his shaded, tired, wonderfully alive mom.
Roberta got through the night, the day, the week, the month. A donor match and a brand-new liver, fresh off the vine, came in July, and gave them room to base their conviction of total recovery on something more than prayer, something concrete and real that they could hold in their hands.
As his mother tried to make sense of the alien part from someone else’s body that was keeping her alive, Zito went back in Visalia, feeling like he was living in a movie or TV series or something, because since when did plot twists like this happen in real life?
*
--September 1999--
Two daughters, one son, and a husband, had their faith return to them like melted silver, cool and flawless sliding back into their hearts. Protected and watched over and constantly thanking God, and then Zito was in Class AA, and then he was in Canada, dizzy with the swiftness of his rise and holding his hands out to catch his balance.
North of the border, netted by the clean gray streets, Zito wished he could just sleep in his car, because he hadn’t lived anywhere longer than two months all season, and if he was gonna be a transient, he might as well just embrace it, go all out.
His car was so comfy and familiar, too. He could get a hotplate, plug it into the cigarette lighter. Engine-block eggs for breakfast, and a penlight held in his teeth so he could read at night without running the car battery down. Hang his legs out the window, seatbelt buckles digging into his back. Awesome.
But, not so much. His dad said flatly, “You’re not a hobo, Barry,” and forbade him from living in his car or a refrigerator box or under a highway overpass or anyplace fun. Zito checked into a hotel. A nice one, because only nice hotels leave you mints.
He chipped into his signing bonus to pay for it. The cost of the room did not make a dent, which was kind of unsettling.
It was true, that Zito’s signing bonus had freaked him out for awhile, and he kinda wanted to keep all of it in shoeboxes under his bed, the lids held on with rubber bands, just so it wouldn’t be some serious adult thing accumulating interest in a bank vault.
Then his sister Bonnie calculated (using, like, algebra and stuff), if he got the money changed into twenties, how many shoeboxes he would need to hold it all. When she told him the bed would basically have to be balanced on the pile of shoeboxes underneath, he tried to explain that he was all about the benjamins, a denomination both hardcore and space-saving, but she wouldn’t do the math again, just told him, “You’re rich. Get over it.” So he did.
Anyway. Mark Mulder was there, in Vancouver, at the tail-end of the summer when Zito showed up with just enough time to start and win one game, five hits and one earned run, and a Rivercats jersey with his name on the back waiting for him in Sacramento next spring.
Later, Zito would search for his first impression of Mulder, but he could never find it. Mulder was just there one day, on the edge of Zito’s awareness like a moth in the corner of the room, as if he’d always been there, unquestioned and immovable. In Zito’s mental visual archive, Mulder is always slouching like a teenager with his hands in his pockets, lips twisted like he’s about to spit on the ground.
Zito couldn’t remember the first time he’d seen Mulder pitch, either. He felt like he’d been born with that slider in his memory. And he couldn’t remember learning all the stuff he knew about Mulder. It just sort of got left in his brain at some point, familiarity through osmosis and forgetfulness. Of course, from the start he knew all the basics about Mulder. Or at least, the basics that were common knowledge.
He knew, as everyone in the system did, that Mulder was the golden boy, the chosen one, the future of the franchise, Oakland’s first pick in the ’98 draft and the second pick overall. Zito had heard all the old gnawing scouts elbow-to-elbow in the stands talking about Mulder’s ‘live arm,’ his ‘natural range,’ and his ‘good face,’ just like they’d talked about a million other guys, most of whom never came to shit.
Mulder was one of the few A’s prospects that other teams had actually been interested in. Though Zito had been drafted twice before, by the Mariners and the Rangers (he was destined for the AL West, it would appear), neither took him first round or offered him a respectable bonus. He waited until his college records got around, didn’t hear anybody talking about his live arm or his good face, and then Billy Beane came along and picked him up like a puppy from a cardboard box on the front porch. Well. Not exactly like that. It was business. Zito wasn’t free to a good home, he was just very very cheap, because no other team had realized the promise of his left arm.
Beane was trying to stop looking for talent with his eyes, Zito eventually figured out. Beane had data and formulas and Magoo-looking motherfuckers with degrees in computer science and a blissful love for baseball statistics. It was weird, a new kind of ballclub, but Zito couldn’t say anything, because nobody else wanted him, nobody else understood about Barry Zito and the course his life was gonna take. Not with that motion. Not with an out pitch that came direct from Little League.
Beane saw right through Zito, and all the ways in which Zito seemed the antithesis of a major league pitcher, because Beane wasn’t looking at Zito, he was looking at the lines in the box scores and radar gun readings, scowling at a printout while Zito was standing right in front of him. Billy Beane saw the numbers and the numbers were everything he needed to know.
When Zito showed Beane his curve for the first time, Beane just grunted dismissively and started talking about WHIP and the various colleges Zito had attended.
Something very strange was happening in Oakland, in that year of our Lord nineteen-hundred and ninety-nine. Especially in the farm system. Zito was sort of used to strange stuff going on, though, so he wasn’t too worried.
Mulder was the exact opposite. After being taken as the second overall pick, Mulder went straight to Triple-A, teleportation and serious holes left in his education. Mulder had been in Vancouver all summer, as Zito was ratcheting up through Visalia and Midland, collision-course aimed at each other.
Mulder’s numbers weren’t amazing, but his stuff made the coaches mumble out of the corners of their mouths about Tom Glavine and Steve Carlton. Mulder’s biggest problem was his control. Which was such a common concern in the minors, it practically had its own mascot.
If Zito thinks real hard about Triple-A in 1999, which was only a year ago and of which he should definitely have a clearer picture (but a lot has happened, so shut up), if he dregs up his memories of Mark Mulder in Canada, Zito usually sees a set of broad shoulders in a gray or maybe navy blue MSU T-shirt, and a pair of scuffed Adidas that were the only shoes in the clubhouse bigger than his own.
He’d heard some stories, about Mulder. Pranks and dares and revenge schemes that Zito would not have guessed from easy-going, order-two-pizzas-for-dinner-and-breakfast, videogame-playing Mulder. The stories didn’t even seem to be about the same guy-maybe the same seven guys, one for every day of the week.
Zito didn’t credit the gossip much, but maybe he was taking an interest in Mulder anyway. Zito kept trying to figure him out. In front of the Playstation, he was a thirteen year old boy-his voice would even crack when he got excited. In a bar, Mulder was so cool, you couldn’t melt ice on him, smirking like he could buy and sell everyone here, shooting his cuffs and turning his wrist so that the light hit the silver links of his watchband and made it glitter. With waitresses and supermarket cashiers, he found the tightrope between creepy and cute, and danced along it without even looking down. Everything he did, he did better than the rest of them, never even breaking a sweat. He was effortless.
Old people liked him. Small children liked him (they also had a tendency to come up to his knee and ask gape-mouthed, “Are you a giant, mister?” Mulder usually said yes, just because it was more fun that way). Umpires and opposing players liked him. Fans adored him, and the bright little crowd of Annies hovered around him with glitter on their eyelids and something wet painted on their mouths. Mulder was exactly what everyone wanted, all their individual wishes come true.
Before too long, Zito knew what to look for, how to gauge the differences in Mulder’s personality, his sense of humor, his choice of jokes to tell, everything. Sometimes there even seemed to be slight changes in his bone structure, in the color of his eyes, in the placement of the fortune lines on his palms. All of it depended on how many people were around, and who they were, if there were girls, or grown-ups, or ballplayers (and then, what kind of ballplayers? Utility men and relievers are not of the same species, much less same breed), and so on and so forth.
The topic of conversation might trigger something new. Zito was watching Mulder carefully one night as the suggestions for how to kill an hour were getting increasingly drunken and hazardous, something about rollerskate races down the raked aluminum roof of the storage shed at the ballpark, and he saw Mulder’s shoulders get somehow bigger, stretching like retractable wings, his eyes going pale and vaguely mocking like when he was being cool, his mouth small and taut, features set and his body held at the ready.
Maybe blood was in the air, adrenaline, the idea of risking everything for a three-second rush under the night sky. This Mulder scared Zito, but also kickstarted his pulse, made him feel young and brave and invincible.
By changing like this, fitting himself in wherever he was, Mulder somehow managed to be everyone’s ideal at the same time. It was remarkable. Close to enviable. But Zito would always remind himself of the basics of who Mulder was, the stuff that stayed the same. Mulder was very tall and very skinny and his hands could crush a person’s skull like a beer can. He threw seven pitches and could still name every man on the Chicago White Sox roster.
After a week of making a study of him, Zito got bored and gave up. He decided to just stay away from Mulder. Less confusing that way.
Zito was only in Vancouver for a couple of weeks, anyway. He was just happy that he had managed to learn his catcher’s name. He definitely didn’t have time for a guy who was too perfect to be trusted.
Tim Hudson had been through Vancouver too, earlier that season. He’d been up with the big club since June, and had spent the summer treating the American League like a bunch of fucking six-years-and-under T-ball teams.
Zito had never met him, and so received all his information about Hudson-quotes and testimonies and fuckin’-swear-this-is-true stories of the first couple months of the season-from his teammates. There was more than one night when fifteen or sixteen of them crammed into the cruddy little clubhouse lounge, perched on the busted couches, raptly watching the A’s claw through September, shaking enemies off their legs and roughly pushing their hair back under their caps. It was basically impossible to keep secrets, when they were seeing their big league futures play out like a vision, an omen.
Hudson would be on the mound on the television, or seen briefly in the dugout, grinning stupidly at everything, and somebody would say, “Hey, you remember that time when Tim-” invariably followed by something illegal or immoral or possibly both, often involving the scaling of a spread-armed tree or a fire escape. Hudson was apparently a sucker for a good view.
By the time the A’s were knocked out of the race, finishing in second place with blood on their faces and spat-out promises about next year, Zito realized that it was mostly Mulder starting those Tim Hudson stories. Zito didn’t think that meant anything, though.
It’s strange to think, later, a lot later, that that 1999 Vancouver team was the first time the three of them wore the same uniform in the same season. Of course, Zito and Hudson were never in the rotation together, and Zito avoided Mulder an awful lot, so it wasn’t like he should have been able to see what was coming.
*
--April-July 2000--
Mulder got to Oakland in April of the next year. Twenty-two years old, nine months older than Zito, an Irish-twin brother, and pitching in the big leagues. This after his first two starts in Sacramento that spring, when he allowed fifteen hits and eleven runs.
Zito began to suspect, at some point when the season was still so young that it shone like glass, that Mulder had managed to brainwash the entire Oakland ballclub into believing that he, Mulder, would be the savior of the team.
(It’s possible that Zito had been stoned when he came up with that; he continued to smoke on a semi-regular basis until he made the bigs, and then gave it up except for the off-season, national holidays, April 20th, his birthday, other peoples’ birthdays, and nights before off days if he’d struck out ten or more in his last outing, as a reward and incentive and means by which to make Cartoon Network even more hilarious than it usually was.)
Mulder hadn’t really pitched all that well in the minors, but his tour had been about three months shorter than Zito’s, who had pitched astonishingly well, and had to actually go through the bus leagues, unlike a certain spastic left-hander.
Zito figured Mulder must have just stood there with his shoulders and his legs and his tapered chest and stomach looking like a fucking Ken doll’s, tossing a baseball between his hands and grinning crookedly, without worry, working some kind of voodoo: I look like a classic pitcher. I look like I’m not afraid of the Yankees. I am what you have been waiting for.
It was like a Jedi mind trick or something. A season and two games in Triple-A, a nifty little 4.70 ERA for his professional baseball career, and Mark Mulder was pitching in the rotation behind Tim Hudson like he’d been born there, leaning against Hudson in the dugout and smiling pretty for the camera. Mulder was made for cameras. National television coverage. SportsCenter highlights.
It must have been a scam. Zito thinks sometimes he even fell for it himself, once he got to Oakland after the All-Star break, and started seeing it all in living color. It was hard to ignore. Mark Mulder at full-force, whichever Mark Mulder you liked best. Mark Mulder would win you over, eventually, because winning was just what the son of a bitch did.
This was when Mulder was a rookie too, six and a half feet tall, a hundred and ninety pounds soaking wet and carrying rolls of quarters in his pockets, his hair buzzed so short on the sides you could see scalp. He slouched a lot and talked with his mouth full and would wear the same rank T-shirt for days on end until one of the guys stole it for the good of the team.
Mulder wasn’t all that good-looking, not as cool as he liked to think, and all the custom-made versions of himself were watered-down, forgeries of the real thing, kind of irritating, kind of compulsive, kind of pathetic. But nobody else seemed to realize it, and Mulder was still traveling with a crowd.
Zito kept squinting and trying to figure it out, what Mulder had that lit him up like a porch light and drew everyone in. Zito tried to follow the trend, tried to convince himself that Mulder was hot, and cool, and funny, and all the things he pretended to be, but usually it didn’t work. Soon enough, though, a year or two, Mulder would be worth a second look, that was evident.
When Mulder filled out and his elbows didn’t double as fucking Ginsu knives; when his shoulders straightened up and became lined with muscle and he stopped slumping to hide his height, kept his head up; when he let his hair grow down just to the tips of his ears, and maybe scruffed up his face a bit with a dirty blonde five o’clock shadow; when he would be in the weight room four days a week and Zito would be able to watch him getting stronger and better, the streamlined movement of his back at the row machine, and his arms pulled out like airplane wings, his straight lines making him a cross and his bare chest making him the one to be crucified, sweat on his face and neck, finally living up to the promise of his frame and.
Fuck.
See, that was why. Stuff like that. Just idly looking over at Mulder and thinking about how he wasn’t all that good, way overrated, and then suddenly Zito’s mind was halfway to getting Mulder stripped naked and bent over the fucking weight bench.
Zito wondered if there was something in that cologne Mulder used sometimes, pheromones or something, and then sighed. Hopeless.
Mulder could fuck up the entire summer and sink the team as only a terrified punk-kid pitcher can do, all his pitches staying up or hanging right over the middle of the plate, the batters jumping out of the way of wild pitches and the nervous guy in the elephant suit casting distrustful glances from on top of the dugout.
Mulder could ruin them epically, unforgivably, but then, after the game, he could walk in from the showers with a towel around his slatted waist, flip-flops slapping the cement, and nothing else, his skin damp and red from the heat. He was the only man in the world who could honest-to-god motherfucking strut while wearing only a towel and flip-flops, rolling his shoulders back and skimming a hand over his hair.
Part of it, Zito acknowledged, was the specificity of his giveaways, his tells. Mulder’s left hand was slightly paler from being hidden in his glove all the time, and his ears cocked out a bit from being jammed by a cap every day of his life. There were chafed places of the backs of his arms from the dugout bench, and a bruise over his hipbone from a comebacker during infield practice. The faint impression of the stitches wasn’t visible from across the room, but if a person got closer, by whatever means necessary, they could see it like a brand on Mulder’s skin, the curve of the stitches matching the curve of Mulder’s hipbone as if it’d been designed for that very purpose.
All these abstruse clues, clear solid proof that this guy was a ballplayer, a major leaguer and as incurable as any of them. And of course there was nothing more corrupting and addictive than a serious ballplayer. At least, there wasn’t if you were Barry Zito.
sigh.
*
--September 2000--
And the scam has been kept up, all season long, until Zito wants to shake someone, crack his hand across their faces, snap the fuck out of it.
But Mark Mulder can still fool every one of them, even Rick Peterson, even Billy Beane. The spitting image of Elite Young Pitcher. Or at least, the Elite Young Pitcher: Larval Stage. The possibilities in Mark Mulder, they make Zito’s throat close up. Nothing to prove it yet. Hardly anything to even argue it. But there you go.
Mulder’s got as much potential as anyone Zito’s ever seen, that’s true. But for some reason Zito keeps thinking of him as a cautionary tale waiting to happen. A spook story for little pitchers to keep them quiet before bed: Once upon a time, Mark Mulder could have been as good as anyone ever has been, but no one made him work for it and he got lazy, let his mechanics go and skipped out on bullpen sessions, eventually lost his touch for the game, and then he went insane, and ran off into the woods alone.
Zito grins slightly, whispers to himself, “And he was never heard from again.”
He’s watching Mulder struggle through the fourth, two on and no outs and the heart of the order stalking around the front of the visitors’ dugout. Zito’s feeling pretty good.
The thing about Zito, remember, is that he doesn’t look like how pitchers are supposed to look. And he knows that, he’s made his peace. He wouldn’t want to look like Mulder, anyway, not for a million. Well. Maybe his eyes, because blue is a good color on Zito, but that’s it.
Here on the bench with his tailbone grinding painfully no matter how he shifts around, and Zito’s been waiting for this his whole life. He’s thinking about the scouts and coaches and agents, back when he was in high school and just starting college, who never even gave him a decent shot. They took one look and turned away. Zito was just some kid who hadn’t grown into his hands or feet yet, with dilated pupils and unwashed hair brushing his shirt collar. He had that parody of a delivery and those three goofy harmless pitches, so he can understand why they were skeptical.
His understanding of their doubt is abstract, of course. It’s academic. Because, throughout his life, Zito has learned nothing as well as he has learned that he is good enough at this game to go all the way. To go as far as he wants.
His dad was telling him that before Zito could properly form all his consonants. Randy Jones told him that when Zito was practicing cursing at the park and pounding his fist into his glove, eyeing the plug of chewing tobacco sticking up out of Jones’s back pocket and trying to figure out if he even wanted some, much less wanted some enough to ask for it. And his mom, who had always believed in a lot of things and made up her own prayers, had said to him once, “You are worth every day that we waited for you.”
Zito has heard this stuff all his life. And everything he’s ever done has substantiated it, too. It’s never been challenged, not seriously, never been any real threat to the implacable theory of how good he is. Zito’s charmed life is evidence of a God who actually has his back-and it’s all the proof Zito needs.
It’s not his fault that he believes the obvious. He won’t be at all surprised if someday a total stranger comes up to him on the street and says, “hey, you are a fucking amazing pitcher.”
Everyone he has ever trusted has told him that. And he can read his own stats. He knows that no matter what they want to say about his unorthodox delivery or how hitters will figure out the curve from Zito’s arm angle by their third at-bat, no matter what they say-Zito wins baseball games. He wins them all the time. He always has, for as long as he can remember. It’s what he does best, the one thing he has always been able to do.
Which is one of the reasons that Zito isn’t worried about the slip in his velocity, coming down the stretch, here on the bench on the twelfth day of September. His change-up is still ten to fifteen miles slower than the heat, depending on what kind of razors are in his eyes that day, and ten-fifteen is more than enough difference to make them look stupid. He’ll take it easy before his next start, maybe rack it up a few notches, but it’s no big deal.
And the deuce is still the deuce. Just like it’s been since Zito learned it at seven years old, and Zito is used to it by now, it hardly ever takes him by surprise anymore. Everybody else, on the other hand.
(an interlude-1990)
One time, back home in San Diego when he was maybe twelve, he’d been messing around in the front yard, throwing his curve to amuse himself, hooking it into the dead-center of the oak tree’s trunk. He was doing real good, each time he spun it off his fingers and pushed over with his thumb, it looped and dove and went right where he wanted it, something more flown than thrown.
He heard a gasp as he released another one, then a small falling-thumping noise, and Zito turned. There was a woman collapsed on the sidewalk, groceries scattered and oranges rolling into the gutter, her small curled hand looking salt-pale on the asphalt.
Zito left his mitt and ball on the grass, ran and got his dad, and the lady was fine, of course, maybe heatstroke or exhaustion or something like that, but she was just fine, sitting at their kitchen table sipping lemonade and holding a cool washcloth to her forehead.
She apologized a lot for being such trouble, and rubbed her temples, Zito’s dad patting her arm comfortingly, and Zito had to fight down his grin, because it wasn’t heatstroke and it wasn’t exhaustion.
She’d seen him throw his curveball, or maybe even just the ball after it’d left his hand, dropping out of nowhere on a flight path that appeared to break about twenty-seven laws of physics, and the way sometimes the curve looked remote controlled, or even kind of scary, if you saw it at the right moment, slicing like a knife, when it was a fist-sized white weapon with red markings-the Soviets!
It’s a new technology, pocket-sized destruction. Zito’s eyes got a bit wider; he could see it all.
The next frontier, pitcher-soldiers, infielders parachuting in, catchers stuffed into fighter jets. An impossible kind of war that’ll be fought with sliders and knuckleballs and cutters. The Siege of Yankee Stadium. The Invasion of Sandy Koufax’s Curveball. Scarred battlefields littered with dead baseballs and settled black smoke, waiting for someone to come and clean the burned earth, roll out the foul lines again and stomp the bases into the ground. Incredible.
Somewhere between the futuristic death-toys of the communists, and the flagrantly surreal hook of the ball, the lady’s mind had folded in and she’d passed out from the sheer brilliance of it. Zito knew it for sure.
Zito thought for awhile about Saul being struck blind on the road to Damascus. And also about his own gangly pre-adolescent legs trembling when Kirk Gibson slammed that home run to win Game 1, Zito’s awareness that if he hadn’t been sitting at that moment, he would have fallen. He looked at his hands on the kitchen table, still too big for him, ugly hands with prodding knuckles and torn-up nails, but he knocked someone out today, with these hands, this one in particular, the marked hand.
It was power, probably, that thick hot feeling in his chest, a vague sense of reeling around drunkenly. Power from these huge stupid-looking hands. The ability to make people fall down and spill their groceries. Any kind of power, though, Zito didn’t really care. Any kind.
*
--September 2000--
Hudson’s down at the other end of the dugout, snickering with Menechino, both their heads bowed inwards. Zito has noticed people looking from him to Hudson to Mulder recently, though in no particular order, just one after the other after the other. He knows the three of them are supposed to be . . . something. The what hasn’t yet been made clear to him. But it’s supposed to be pretty good, whatever it is.
Zito’s had a hell of a debut. Not yet two full months in the majors, and his ERA is under three after nine starts. His last outing, he pitched a five-hit, complete-game shutout, every microscopic piece of the universe clicking easily into place just for him.
He had pulled off his cap so he could tip it to the overjoyed crowd, and felt his hair drawn free from under his jersey, feeling the breeze on the nape of his neck and deciding abruptly that he’s a major leaguer now, and he’s going to get a goddamn haircut.
Right then, though, on the field with the full nine innings resting so-far-comfortably in the muscles of his shoulders and back, there was a chance that that was as happy as Zito’s ever been. More even than when Zito had held his mom’s hand as the doctor walked briskly into her hospital room with a big ole wedge of a grin on his papery face, and the name of a matching donor on his clipboard.
On the bench, in the dugout, in the fucking here and now (focus, man, jesus), Zito is watching Mulder pitch, and keeping Hudson in his peripheral vision, on the look-out for quick movements and attacks from the side. Three people is probably better than two, Zito thinks. If one of them gets cracked over the head with a bar stool, there’s still the other to watch his back. Better odds with higher numbers. Yeah.
The inning finally ends and Mulder comes in with his eyes on the ground, lagging behind the rest of the team, even the outfielders. Mulder sits down next to Zito and whips off his cap, drags on his warm-up jacket. Mulder doesn’t look frustrated or scared or anything like that. That would fuck up his image.
Zito remembers, well, he remembers something and he’s not sure, because it was really weird, and he kind of felt like he was dreaming or sleepwalking or something, though it didn’t happen while he was asleep. That would be too simple an excuse.
*
--April 2000--
Something about Mulder’s last night in Sacramento, however many months and major league baseball games ago that was, because Mulder had gotten word from the Oakland front office during the sixth inning, and was gonna drive to the East Bay tomorrow morning while the rest of them were gathering at the yard.
Mulder was going out with a bunch of the guys, farewell and good luck and let’s get drunk, that sort of thing, but before that, there was the west wall of the stadium.
And how Zito had pushed out through the side door with his bag slung over his shoulder, and caught a glimpse of red shirt in the corner of his eye, vanishing around the edge of the building. Zito ducked around the corner because he was fucking nosy and he wanted to know which Mulder was out here.
Mulder was there leaning against the west wall, which was smooth red-orange brick, no door or anything interesting, not even a dumpster or a gulch back there. Mulder was looking at the sky. That’s all there was to look at.
Zito, well, it’s hard to say. It probably had something to do with Mulder going to the Show, getting that much closer to becoming everything he could be. That’s sounded like a good, believable reason. Something Zito could tell his therapist.
But also it was just Mulder, and he was a straight line, his body acutely angled. Shoulders resting on the wall, chest-stomach-legs like a single board of wood. A plank, if ‘plank’ didn’t have all those pirate connotations. But Mulder looked so uncomplicated, right then, a long slender backslash against the west wall and no surprises, totally self-explanatory. Zito licked his lips, looking at Mulder’s neck. Maybe an incline, something to get your hands braced on and climb like a tree.
There was probably movement, and definitely contact, and it’s a good bet that Zito lost a button or two and Mulder bit his own lip to bleeding. The details come and go like a flipbook with pages missing.
Zito remembers pressing his hand down flat to Mulder’s chest, sliding it southward and whispering in Mulder’s ear, “maybe they’ll fucking feed you out there, huh?” as Mulder’s ribs through his shirt made lean pipe-like dents across his palm.
He also remembers Mulder laughing through his nose at one point, muttering, “stupid fucker,” but Zito’s not sure what he did to incur that. Maybe he shut Mulder up, then. Maybe he did it the only way he knew how.
Probably the reason it’s so foggy in his mind is because Zito’s one overriding awareness, throughout the whole thing, was that Mulder wasn’t pushing him away. Thirty seconds in, when Mulder tilted his head curiously and ran the tip of his tongue over Zito’s lips, it was already in huge Vegas-bright letters in his mind: HE IS NOT PUSHING YOU AWAY. Sick blood-red neon and blinking on and off spasmodically. Weird thing to imagine.
Zito’s shoulder was propped on the west wall, so he ended up with all this red-orangey dust on his shirt. He tried to swipe it off, but it just smeared into tiger stripes. Mulder still didn’t push him away, no matter what Zito tried to do to him, no matter where his hands or mouth went. It made Zito wish they were somewhere a bit more horizontal, then he got angry and disappointed and bitter all at the same time.
The good thing about not being drunk was that Zito would definitely remember this, and Mulder would have no excuse to claim he didn’t want it, though he would probably try to anyway. The bad thing was that Zito was sharp enough to realize, even as it happened, that this was one-time only.
Temporary insanity. Getting called up to the Show will do that to a person. As for Zito, well, maybe Mulder drove him crazy while Zito wasn’t paying attention. It could have happened. Then Mulder closed his teeth on Zito’s earlobe, and rucked up his shirt so Mulder could find skin and other exciting things.
Zito would have thought, ‘ah, fuck it,’ but to tell the truth, he wasn’t really thinking of anything, except a fervent wish that Mulder knew the reciprocation rule, because fuck if Zito was gonna tear up his knees for a handjob.
Mulder was so bony it kinda hurt. Zito would be finding bruises in strange places for a week. The side of his neck, near his jaw. The inside of his arm. His collarbones, both of them, looking painted by ash. Zito was on his knees with his hands pulling at Mulder’s belt but not undoing it yet, and when he pressed his face to Mulder’s stomach, he got a rib in his forehead and a hipbone against his neck, but it was warm too, and tasted good, something he should probably memorize.
Mulder was gonna be damn hot someday, Zito finally admitted, biting the hollow of Mulder’s hip and pushing his hands up Mulder’s chest. Once he grows his hair out some, that’ll definitely help.
Zito chanced a look up and Mulder was staring down at him, looking stunned. His eyes were overly bright, making Zito worry about gas leaks for a second of patented Zito-nonsense, but then Mulder’s face did something, something odd. His jaw tightened but his forehead was swept clear. The corners of his eyes turned down, and the tense knot of his mouth came free. The tendon in his neck relaxed. His eyelids closed halfway, looking smoky and so fucking chill, and Zito didn’t even care about his knees anymore.
Mulder smiled, just barely, so that it was more like the abstract theory of a smile than anything, and Zito realized what this was. Who this was.
“Mark, god,” Zito tried to say, but no sound came out.
He’d been wrong, man. Mulder wasn’t gonna be hot, some way far off day when Zito had already stopped paying attention to him. Mulder was already there, this Mulder, jesus, and Zito was sort of babbling in his head, something about how this Mulder is the best Mulder and all the Mulders should be like this Mulder, because this Mulder is fuckin’ hot, when Mulder gave him a patiently (and, what? Mark Mulder, patient? What next, Barry Zito, Republican?) exasperated look, and curved his fingers around Zito’s jaw, his ear, the back of his head, tugging him back and arching his hips off the wall when Zito touched him again.
Zito was thinking maybe Mulder didn’t even have to get him back. You get a chance to blow the (all-of-a-fucking-sudden) hottest guy in the league (either league!), you just keep your head down (heh) and do your best not to freak him out.
Turned out Zito needn’t have worried. He used his hands and his throat and Mulder slammed up and out, his head whacking back against the brick. Zito stood and spit the taste out of his mouth, hiking Mulder’s shorts back up. Mulder was slumped against the wall with his eyes closed, breathing deep and Zito’s shoulder was against his chest for support, and then he suddenly wasn’t, he’d vanished, he’d dropped to his fucking knees, easy as that.
Zito gaped and brushed fingers across Mulder’s face, hissing, “Fuck,” to see him down there. Mulder grinned up at him, friendly charming grin and nothing like the slow, sleepy look Mulder had shown him earlier, but Zito thought maybe this was really Mulder too. Shit, maybe all of them were real.
Zito’s head spun. He held onto Mulder’s for balance, sliding his hands over the army-cut and imagining the hippie/crewcut picture the two of them must be making, the Poor Homesick Navy Boy led astray into careless hedonism by the Long-Haired Probably-Communist Queer, and that was funny enough to make him snort into his arm and bite down on his wrist. Then Zito pictured Mulder’s mouth opening, Mulder sucking on his lips to make them all tender and debauched, and Zito remembered that he didn’t actually have to imagine anything, not right now.
Zito took his arm off his face and looked down. Mulder’s mouth was open, that wasn’t a dream. It was circled and just waiting, so Zito scratched at Mulder’s head and made pushy high-pitched noises to the effect of, ‘please suck me off as soon as is humanly possible thank you.’
Mulder slanted a glance up at him, and Mulder’s hand moved slowly, almost absent-mindedly. Zito was shaking and soon enough he’d beg, which was probably what Mulder wanted anyway. Mulder’s mouth was still open, perfect circle. And he caught Zito’s gaze, and Mulder smiled with his ready mouth, winked at him, and got to it.
Zito’s knees almost gave out.
After Zito’d finished off and Mulder had gotten to his feet again, Zito leaning against him and panting shallowly, Mulder twisted his whole hand in Zito’s hair, not pulling or stroking, just holding there like maybe his hand had gotten cold and why let the hippie hair go to waste? It was kind of disconcerting, Mulder’s hand wound in his hair. Zito wondered if Mulder could touch both of his ears with one hand, then decided he probably could.
Mulder’s hand in Zito’s hair, was it possible that this was the weirdest thing that had happened tonight?
They moved away from the wall together, but then Zito turned and Mulder was gone. Not even a puff of smoke left behind. Lucky bastard. Zito wished he could disappear too, just like that, it wasn’t fair to just go off and leave him alone, really it wasn’t.
Zito had no idea how long that biz-fuckin’-arre interlude against the west wall had lasted or where Mulder went afterwards or, really, where he himself had gone, because the next thing he remembered was waking up in the morning, shirtless and wearing only one sock, on the linoleum floor of his tiny hotel room kitchen.
Mulder had taken off for Oakland by then, of course, leaving Zito to kick his suitcase around the room and not think about all the stuff that he didn’t know. The temporary insanity had worn off and now he was mostly just sick. He carried an empty brown paper grocery bag around with him, just in case.
And no matter how much he tried not to, he kept hearing questions, really basic terrible stuff that got screamed until the voice inside his mind cracked and got all hoarse. Like, for instance-WHAT? And-WHY? And, his own personal favorite-THE FUCK?
For the sentimental sort in the audience, there was a dim hopeful voice, too, pestering insistently at the back of Zito’s mind-‘hey man we’re gonna keep doing this, you’re not done with me, right?’-but Zito wasn’t hearing that in any sort of conscious way. Wouldn’t have done him much good, even if he was paying attention. Can’t ask that question of a guy who was no longer in the fucking county.
There was confusion and shock and pissed-offedness, as would be expected, and also some totally futile regrets that Mulder didn’t mention he liked dick sooner than the night before he left. Jesus, it woulda made Canada so much more fun.
Zito pretty much didn’t know anything. He was fairly sure it was his fault, but he remembered Mulder not pushing him away, though he’d had a million chances and had gotten down on his knees without Zito even lifting an eyebrow, so.
Zito sat down on the floor, his head in his hands. Mulder was in the major leagues and Zito had to get to the ballpark in a half an hour. His life couldn’t get fucked up, not right now.
Zito went out to the yard, and kept on pitching better than Mark Mulder, and never got any of his questions answered, but he did get called up in July. His mom was there for his first start. Mulder was in the dugout, watching him like a scientist, like Zito was a bug. Zito just pitched. All he could do.
*
--September 2000--
And, now it’s September again, isn’t it. Another baseball season three weeks from done, and then everything will change just like it always does. Zito looks at Mulder and blows out a breath. Mulder has never answered any of Zito’s questions about what happened that night. Of course, Zito’s never actually got it up to ask them. Still.
Whatever. Not everything has to be a learning experience.
The only thing Zito knows about what happened the night Mulder got called up is that they have not spoken of it since.
Mulder’s sitting next to him, and they’re both major league pitchers now. Mulder never looks scared, that’s the thing. Never shows it, no matter which man he’s trying to be. None of Mulder’s versions of himself ever get frightened. That’s what kills Zito.
Mulder’s not really blessed, he just looks it. So he’s got no cause to act like he’s so fucking unafraid. Zito never gets seen for what he is, because he looks like a flake and a burnout and the fucking leech who sleeps on the couch for six months without even offering to chip in on the rent, all the things Zito might have been, in another world, a baseball-less existence.
But fuck what other people think when they size him up. The truth is, Zito’s the blessed one. He can tell by his stats, and by the season and a half that took him from Class A to being twenty-two years old and in the starting rotation of a contending team. He can tell by the way he has loved baseball for the entirety of his life, and he is as good at the game as most everyone in the world (or at least, he will be, someday). Nobody gets that lucky. Talent and passion at the same time? It’s not really fair.
He can also tell by the fact that he’ll call his mom tonight and they’ll talk about old stuff and new stuff and silly stuff and pretty much anything. The only word that fit what happened was the word ‘miracle.’ So that’s what they use.
His whole family has been wandering around for the past year like they’re shell-shocked, beaming and laughing a lot. And Zito, on the bench, in the clubhouse, against the west wall, with his new faith around him like an old worn-soft jacket, faith in himself and whatever it was that saved his mother and whatever it is that will save him. He is being kept safe, and he believes this with all his heart. That means it’s true.
Zito can’t say that to Mulder, though. Mulder already thinks he’s crazy. Mulder is next to him, gazing at the field with his eyes unfocused. Zito can see Hudson, all the way down the line of the bench. Mulder’s profile is fuzzy, then Hudson’s is, switching as Zito shifts his focus. He does that for awhile, until Mulder kicks his foot and says, “Knock it off.”
Zito grins at him. Mulder can play at being perfect, he can pretend to be the best pitcher of all time even though he’s almost a full season in and two games under .500. Mulder can imagine himself untouched, and above the petty drama of the world, and totally in control.
Mulder can also make believe that he’s not gay or doesn’t really want to fuck Zito, but Zito’s pretty sure Mulder is the one who will end up the more fucked up by this, because Zito doesn’t have that kind of bad karma shadowing him, waiting for the opportunity to kick him in the shins and run away.
It’s a fine diversion, and a free country, so Mulder can go ahead and pretend whatever he wants, then call Zito the crazy one. Whatever. Zito decided awhile ago that he does not need Mark Mulder, and will not ever need him, and that’s the kind of promise he keeps.
Zito’s got the life Mulder wishes he could have. Impossible, but true. Because Zito has been blessed, and Mulder would rather be lucky than good. It took Zito a long time to figure that out, but he got it eventually.
If he wants, if he thinks it’ll help, Mulder can even imagine a thin gold light all around his body that keeps him sheltered and dry.
It doesn’t matter. Nothing in this game is what you think it is. And Zito’s happy to keep it that way, keep his luck to himself until someone breaks his fingers prying them off, because Zito’s never been too good at sharing.
Shouldn’t be too hard. He’s got a hell of a poker face, and he lies as easily as he breathes. He is a pitcher, after all.
Zito winks at Mulder and Mulder gives him a strange look. Zito can still feel Mulder’s teeth on his stomach, and Zito thinks, ‘you just had to fuck with me, didn’t you.’
Three weeks left in their first year as big leaguers, and Mulder and Zito are knee-to-knee on the bench, Mulder staring off at left-center field as if there’s something more than just a wall out there.
Zito carefully shifts and slides and subtly angles until he can lightly hook his index finger in Mulder’s belt loop. Mulder doesn’t notice, caught up in whatever the fuck’s going on in his head. Zito grins, the big grin with lots of teeth that makes him look kind of like a wolf. He’s scared toddlers with it before, so he knows it works.
Zito tugs Mulder’s belt loop, and starts figuring out how bad he’ll have to fuck Mulder up before they’re even.
THE END
okay i have to go now. get some sleep; the game's not until five o'clock.