that's GODDAMN RIGHT (also a fic)
Did y'all see my boy dealing tonight! That's what I'm talking about.
Man, tell ya a story about how I quite literally stopped biting my nails on Friday, mainly cos my fingers were all bloody and painful all the time and I didn't have any nails to get a good cigarette-flick off, and nothing nothing nothing like a 1-0 victory to test the limits of a kid's willpower, dude, nothing like it.
Oh, my boy's a gamer, you know it's true. When T-rex (if you're confused by this nickname, take a look at Durazo's arms, which barely come past his waist, and be enlightened as to how he is a prehistoric thunderlizard who says GRRRRRRRR!) hit that dinger, I thought it was just the start, but it turned out not to even matter, yo.
What, by the way, is UP with Dotel's insistence on putting at least ONE runner on in his every appearance? Like, cheers for getting the save, O.D., but could you not give a kid a heart attack in the process! Jeez, the game was nerve-wracking enough.
Oh, but Zeet, my dear dear Zeet. How many strikeouts? TEN! Season high! Everybody in the stadium got a free 2 liter of Pepsi (which happens every time A's pitcher fan 8, best promotion ever). And he was striking them out with high fastballs, which was, like, ridiculously weird, because high heat's one thing, but 88 mph high heat is also known as 'merry christmas, batter,' but man, he had them just tied up. It was so great.
I am thrilled. Bonds is one away, baby! My Giants have taken over the wild card lead, after much scrapping to get there. The five-team mess in NL is ridic. But you know what, fuck the wild card. We're gonna catch the Dodgers, it's gonna be miraculous. Better believe it. All my boys are tough like nails, they cannot be stopped.
Joyous.
*
Okay, so a little while ago I found out that one Mark Mulder and one Barry Zito just happened to play in the Cape Cod Baseball League the same summer, '97 when they were both nineteen.
It was basically like God coming down from heaven and saying, "Hey, Candle, please write a story about your boys when they were shiny new and younger'n hell."
And far be it for me to refuse the requests of the good Lord.
Back in the Day
By Candle Beck
So it’s the summer of 1997 and that means you’re in Cape Cod.
Only the best college players go to the Cape Cod Baseball League, it’s famous like that, historic. You’re all out of place on the East Coast, nothing’ll stand still for you.
Yeah, well, whatever.
You don’t really know him, not until he steals your raincoat on accident.
You play on different teams, you with the Bourne Braves, red caps with yellow brims, and he’s with the Wareham Gateman, maroon jerseys and stitched white letters and no one seems to know what a Gateman is, anyway.
He’s real popular, around the league, but nobody calls him by his right name. He’s ‘deuce,’ mainly, that dropkick of a curve, silly cartoonish hook, making your own twelve-to-six break feel cold and professional, unremarkable. Also they call him ‘California,’ though there’s a bunch of guys out from the West Coast, but he gets the honor of the name ‘cause you can spot him coming a mile off, with his brushing long hair and the braided hemp necklace he wears with the zing of a blue glass bead rattling around in the hollow at the base of his throat.
Lots of the guys, they’re not taking this too seriously. You can pick them out, the ones who every night haunt the alley behind the liquor store that doesn’t card, the ones who stumble in for team meetings messy-eyed and high-pitched giggling, higher’n kites.
You’re vaguely scornful, though of course to each his own, but this is a serious thing, an honest thing, this game and this league, and if they’re good enough to be here, then they shouldn’t fuck it up by . . . getting fucked up.
But maybe you’re just a pussy.
Anyway, you know he smokes pot, too, dealt a bit early on before his supply ran low, and that’s even stupider-looking like a stoner and then going ahead and being a stoner too. At least he shouldn’t live up to stereotypes like that.
And once you saw him behind the Coastway Diner, blocky Dumpster shadows and crumbling gray stone, and he had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, smoking shamefully with patches of color on his cheeks that were either guilt or the lingering heat-blush of the lighter flame.
That was incongruent, and stopped you dead in your tracks a little bit. He’s such a latter-day hippie and latter-day hippies can smoke pot, but not cigarettes. Especially not latter-day hippies trying to pass themselves off as serious athletes. Or even just pitchers.
But he looked right with a cigarette burning steady, his eyes cast far off. He looked cool. It made you flush, made you feel stutters on your tongue again, and he didn’t even know you were there. You ducked away, off with your friends and left him alone.
Anyway. You don’t really know him.
He pitches against your team sometime in late June and just shuts you the fuck down. You don’t play that day, you can’t do anything but watch it from the bench. You realize then that the curve, as good as it is, honestly the curveball means shit. It’s change of speed, it’s the way he slots the change-up same as the fastball. It’s trickery, man, misdirection.
He’s laughing with his infielders and punching his catcher affectionately on the chest protector with his mitt and his hair keeps slipping free of his cap, rustling over his ears and skimming the collar of his jersey. You kind of like the look of him, though he’s really just a punk kid, end of the day, nothing much more than that. He’s not gonna come to anything, smoking cigarettes behind the diner and selling pot in his swear-to-God tie-dyed fucking T-shirts, like, jesus, dude.
And when you file out to slap fives with Wareham after the solid trouncing, you see him up close for the first time and for some weird reason you think, ‘goddamn flake’ with a flash of brief jagged anger.
He’s got these insolent eyes. The first time you think that, you shake it off, ‘cause ‘insolent,’ that’s a grown-up’s word, a substitute teacher’s word, and you’re not even street legal yet. You’re too chill to think about other guys like that, you’re laidback and easy-going and all that good shit, and you got no cause to be thinking of other guys as ‘insolent.’
Oughta be, you oughta be thinking of him as tough shit or hardcore, you with your stubborn allegiance to the bad guys in movies who get all the best lines and swing left hooks as rough and pretty as that fucking curveball of his. But there’s a petulance behind his gaze that even all your bad-idea arrogance can’t quite ignore.
Whatever, you don’t really know him. You’re not even sure about his real name, he’s just that kid from California, so fuck it.
Then it rains for a week straight and all the games are cancelled. It’s this strange humid rain, sea-smelling and thick with ozone, rolling down the streets in clouds like boulders, and you spend a lot of time drinking Rolling Rock (not a hypocrite; fucked up on the weekends, when the games are rained out, that’s fine) and trying to find someone in the league from New England who can confirm that this kind of weather in the middle of the summer is in no way fucking normal.
You’re way too tall and you can count your ribs through a sweatshirt, wicket-skinny with these big shoulders just waiting for muscle, hands that can cover a newspaper page, papercuts on your thumb. They call you ‘Chicago.’ Hometowns are a big deal in the Cape League. It’s a lot like college, except the question everybody asks after where you from is who you gonna play for?
Chicago White Sox, man. Goddamn right.
Anyway, it rains and it rains a lot, buckets, cats and dogs, sheets and blankets, and there’s this big party, or gathering-type-thing, over at Chris-from-Mississipp’s house.
Obviously, not his actual house, instead the house of his three-month foster parents who’ve ill-advisedly left town for the weekend, but it shakes out about the same.
Seems like most of the CCBL is there, orbiting around the keg in the backyard and the Playstation in the living room. You keep catching glimpses of him, rioted hair and his face that you keep thinking is pretty like a girl’s, but really it’s not, not girlish at all, just a boy’s face, a very pretty boy’s face, and every time you think that you take another shot.
You don’t go for guys, okay. He’s just annoying, an itch right between your shoulder blades where you can’t reach, he’s got caught on the edge of your perception like lint, but that doesn’t mean nothing.
It’s still raining and somebody’s yelling about the movie Bull Durham, saying they should go run the bases, slide headfirst across the mud, waterplaning. Crazy drunk motherfuckers.
You can kind of hear him in the corner of your mind, hollering, “No I didn’t bring a motherfucking raincoat, since when’s it supposed to rain in motherfucking July,” and you’re drunk enough to laugh until you almost cry at that for some reason, though it’s not all that funny.
He passes out in the hallway early, nineteen years old and more used to pot than liquor, and you don’t remember kneeling down and draping your blue raincoat over him, tucking the collar around his shoulders and folding his hand around one of the empty sleeves, and he sighs and noses against the material, snuffling and a long-way smile breaking quietly on his face.
You sprint home through the rain at three in the morning, knock-down drunk and brilliantly happy.
You wake up the next morning freezing cold, your clothes stuck to you like cellophane, your skin pale and clammy. Shivering, you peel everything off and hop into the shower and make it as hot as you can stand, jerking off ritualistically and not thinking about insolence or pretty stoner boys from California.
Your three-months foster dad makes you pancakes and squints at the blue blue sky out the kitchen window, saying, “Guess you’ll get a chance to play today, huh.” Your mouth’s full, so you just nod and gulp some orange juice. He half-grins at you, tells you in one breath that the Red Sox beat the Yankees last night and don’t forget to call home.
You get out to Eldredge Park, the wind blowing in from the west, the white-light sun strumming through you, and the world is scrubbed clean, gleaming. You play odds-evens with your teammates to see whose turn it is for equipment duty. You come up short, which fucking sucks and throws you off, ‘cause you felt real lucky today, like, untouchable. Nothing to be done for it, though, so you trod off to the equipment shed, which is pretty much just a sweat box, a sweat box crawling with daddy long legs and century-old dust and water-rotted wooden planks bristling with gray splinters.
You’re bent awkwardly over a small mountain of umpire padding, craned and twisted with your arm digging behind the bat rack, clawing out loose baseballs, when a spear of pale light snags across your chest, the equipment shed door edged open.
Trying to look over, you lose your balance, tripping on a facemask and sprawling full-out on your back, sneezing fiercely with your eyes screwed shut because there are bellows of filthy dust clouds rising around your body.
Somebody makes a sound a lot like a muffled laugh, and you’re three steps beyond irritated, grimy and you’ve got dust in your eyes even though your eyes are fucking closed, so you snarl blindly, darting a hand out and catching an ankle, the tight soft casing of a uniform sock. Before you can drag the intruder down to the ground with you, teach him to fucking laugh, a hand snatches your wrist out of nowhere and hauls you to your feet again, sliding up to your upper arm and keeping you steady.
You wipe the back of your forearm across your face and spit dirt to the side. Your eyes water thickly and your mouth feels coated and you blink fast, swallow.
He’s standing there with his stupid dark eyes and a mocking grin on his face, and you’d probably hit him anyway but he’s wearing your raincoat over his uniform, which is enough to make you pause, confused.
“Dude,” he says, fixing his face solemnly.
You nod, suspicious. “Dude,” you answer, all cautious and distrustful.
He swipes at your shoulder and you feint backwards, fists half-raised, but he’s just batting off some of the dust. You grunt in acknowledgement and drum your hands over your arms and chest, coughing. He grins, but only for a second.
“Nice coat,” you say sarcastically.
He lifts his arm, and you see that your raincoat is too big on him, which makes you feel better about the whole situation. The sleeve hangs several inches past his fingertips, and he flaps it around, looking like a first grader in a hand-me-down. He smiles, a row of perfect orthodontic-straight teeth, the spitting image of an all-american boy who never forgets to drink his milk at dinner.
“Woke up at Chris’s wrapped up in it,” he explains, still waving the sleeve around like a flag.
You scratch your head and don’t answer, eyeing him skeptically. You don’t remember covering him up with it, right, on your knees beside his passed-out body and nearly losing your balance.
“Chris’opher said it was yours,” he continues, dropping consonants, talking lazy and you’re not sure if that’s a California thing or a pothead thing. Or both, hell.
You nod. “Yeah, true.” You hold out your hand for it, your face smeared with dust and your warm-up T-shirt stuck to the small of your back, the sweat on your forearms making your skin slick and shiny.
But he doesn’t strip the raincoat off. He hugs himself a little bit, threads his thumb through a buttonhole and waggles it around. “This is a good coat. It’s real . . . soft. Like, broke in. Yeah? I been wearing it all day.”
You narrow your eyes, unsure how to take that. Nobody you know talks like that, all upfront and admitting things that’ll maybe sound weird.
You’re, like, fascinated by his hair. It’s matted on one side and sticking up frayed on the other, and you have this bizarre urge to push it down with your hand, feel it spring up under your palm.
It’s pretty dim in the equipment shed, a single musty light bulb hanging like a noose in the corner, so his eyes look sunk way back in his face, and he’s still too pretty for his own good and really, you gotta stop thinking about him as ‘pretty,’ ‘cause that shit’s only gonna get you into trouble.
You clear your throat, your tongue feeling all swollen, like it doesn’t fit in your mouth, trying to sound appropriately annoyed as you say impatiently, “Well, I can give you the name of the store where my ma bought it, but it won’t do you much good unless you happen to be in Chicago. Can I have it back now?”
He looks up, angling his face into the light and he studies you for a long moment with those brat’s eyes, and you want to squirm under the inspection, feeling laid open, warmth rising to your face and you don’t know what to do with your too-big hands, feeling stupid and nervous and way overheated, which you blame on this fucking sweat box of an equipment shed and nothing more.
He grins.
He just busts out this cocky fucking grin, all i-know-something-you-don’t, all thought-you-had-me-fooled-you-thought-wrong, all i-see-right-fucking-through-you, and then he steps close, chest to chest all of a sudden and you suck in a breath so sharp it whistles between your teeth.
“Hey,” he says low, his voice not much more than a rumble. You swallow hard and his pupils are as big as dimes, which is maybe the faded light in here and maybe the jay he smoked before he came out to the ballpark today and maybe something else entirely, and he raises his hand, touches your throat, just his fingertips on your Adam’s apple so that when you swallow hard for the second time, his hand bobs up and down, and he’s got this creepy little smile on his face now.
“The fuck?” you manage, sounding hoarse and choked to your own ears, sounding embarrassingly turned on, which you most certainly are not, though if that sinking feeling pooling low in your stomach is any indication, you will be soon enough, and you’d really rather him not be this close if that’s gonna be the case.
It’s not him, you’re nineteen years old, random hard-ons still happen. Swear.
His mouth twists interestingly, and you probably shouldn’t be watching his mouth. “Hey,” he whispers again, and he leans forward, and you panic, yank yourself backwards, and of course you trip and fall down again, of course you do.
You tumble backwards onto the pile of ump’s chest protectors and crack your elbow a good one on the bat rack and yelp in pain. You curl your arm against your chest and when you realize he’s laughing, when you realize he’s honest-to-God nearly crying with laughter, arms wrapped round his stomach and howling with it, you see red and sweep-kick his legs out from under him and he topples like a tree, landing all elbows and knees right on top of you.
Your wind is gone and he’s still laughing, hiccupping and wheezing and squirming slowly on top of you, and your face must be the color of a fire truck because you’re as hard as hell and there is no way he doesn’t know that, at this point.
He sneezes against your neck and he’s snickering as his one hand snakes up behind your neck and his other worms between your bodies and then he’s laughing and mouthing your collarbone and stammering, “Smooth, so smooth, wow,” and jerking your belt open and your raincoat is fanned out over the both of you like a tent and you’re shaking like a kid, your hands high on his sides, fingers jigsawed into the dents of his ribs through his jersey, and his crazy hair sweeping across your face.
He’s got a hand down the front of your pants and squirrels up your body, knocking his chin against your jaw kinda painfully and licking your ear and kissing all over your face before he finally locates your mouth, and then it’s all tongue and teeth and you cursing without breath. He’s messily enthusiastic about making out, but his hand knows what it’s doing, gripped and hot and stroking gasps out of you, and somewhere your shirt gets tugged out of your pants and you can feel the cool slippery material of your own raincoat on the skin of your stomach.
You can’t seem to stop kissing him and your hands are in his hair, smoothing through it and trying to plaster it down and petting him all over. He shimmies happily atop you and you suck on his neck, dragging your hands down his body and hooking your fingers in his belt loops, locking his hips with yours and his hand stuck between the two of you, wriggling like a netted fish.
This is all very junior high school dry-humping, but it’s also definitely kind of awesome.
You’re feeling on top of the world and not very heterosexual at all, because you want to suck this guy’s dick and leave marks all over him and maybe even find out his real name, but mostly you just want him to keep kissing you like that, dirty like a porn star and sweet like a best friend, and you manage to pop three buttons getting his jersey open and you press your mouth to his bare chest and taste salt on your tongue, and then you come all over his hand and your body goes limp, panting.
He pushes against your hip, grinding a little bit, making these throaty noises that are almost a whole new kind of laughter, mumbling, “c’mon, c’mon,” and you weakly try to help him out, hiking your hips up and looking for a rhythm, and it must be good enough because a minute or two later he freezes, shudders, and lets himself collapse on top of you, heavy boy-weight and that obnoxious hair of his is stranded on your tongue, you spitting dryly.
You lie there for awhile, catching your breath, one of your arms around his back, under his open jersey and your blue raincoat. He’s breathing deep and hot into the crook of your neck and shoulder and you hope that he hasn’t fallen asleep. Your heart is ricocheting around, hammering, and you can feel the trembling muscles of his stomach against your own.
You blink wonderingly up at the cracks in the equipment shed roof, threads of clean sky, and the skewed sideshow wires of light from the single bulb and you’re not thinking this through very clearly, because you’re really just feeling so fucking good.
From way far off, you can hear the muffled sounds of your team beginning practice, out on the field, and that’s something that should definitely get you moving, but Christ, you might be about to fall asleep yourself, and fuck getting caught.
Then you remember seeing this good kid from California smoking behind the diner and how that’s such a dumb thing for a serious ballplayer to be doing, so risky, and you realize that there’s nothing more risky about that than there is about lying in a state of varied undress with a random fucking guy who’s not even a teammate in the equipment shed of Eldredge Park.
You scratch your nails on his back, making him hum and burrow his face deeper into your neck. You poke at his head with your other hand, making noises to indicate that he should probably get up now and stuff.
He murmurs in discontent, but pushes off you, rolling away and sitting up and looking around blearily. You get up on your elbows and yeah, this is gonna get awkward, pretty soon now.
Your eyes want to attach themselves to the bare strip of his chest, the hatch marks of your teeth, warm skin toasted from the Pacific sun, but you’re blushing pretty bad now and so you just pull your gaze away, go about the business of fixing your pants and belt, stuffing your shirt back in.
He’s scooted to sit with his back against the wall, watching you and his face is closed off like a door’s been shut, deadbolted. You’ve finished getting yourself back in order and now you don’t know what to do.
You stare down at your hands, you wish for a baseball to fiddle with, but reaching to get one would be a little too obvious.
“Can I keep your raincoat?”
Your eyes dart up, strung with dim ringing fear, off-balance because his voice sounds so goddamn normal. He’s fingering the hem of the raincoat; his jersey’s still open.
Your mouth’s all dry and your mind feels fuzzy, disconnected. “Uh . . . sure. Yeah, sure,” you answer dumbly, some weird paranoid part of your brain thinking that the only reason he stuck his hand down your pants was ‘cause he wanted you to give him your raincoat.
He grins. “Cool. Thanks.”
His fingers go to the buttons of his jersey, and you surprise yourself by asking, “What’s your name?” You wince because having to ask that question of someone you just teenage-fucked probably isn’t the most upstanding thing that’s ever happened to you.
He gives you a look, still half-smiling. You try to echo it, ha-ha-we’re-all-cool-guys-here, but the attempt feels lame. “Barry,” he replies, and you almost expect him to hold out his hand for you to shake, but he doesn’t.
You regard him uncertainly. “Like, for real?”
He cocks his head to one side. “Of course for real. That’d be a weird thing to lie about.”
You think that telling someone what your name is, in a situation like this, is actually a pretty good thing to lie about, but you don’t tell him that. You shrug. You just got a handjob from a boy named Barry. Crazy world.
“I just never met anybody named that before.”
He nods, and shifts a little bit so that his outstretched leg nudges against your knee. “And you’re Mark.”
He knew your name the whole time. You almost smile, but bite it back at the last second. He knows your name, big fucking deal, quit acting like a fourteen year old girl. But you’re blushing with pleasure, you can feel the burn in your ears, washing down your neck.
“I’m Mark,” you agree.
He knocks your knee with his leg, grinning. “I know probably seven hundred guys named Mark.”
You pull up an eyebrow, spike him with a look. “That mean you’re not gonna remember me?”
He rolls his eyes. “Yeah, you’re pretty forgettable. Except for, you know, totally not at all.”
You can’t help it-you grin back at him like an idiot.
You sit like that for awhile, getting back under control, and he stands first, offering you a hand and pulling you up. He brushes his hands down your chest, breezing the dust off, lifts both hands to your head to sculpt your hair, his eyes narrowed in concentration and a little pink triangle of his tongue sticking out the corner of his mouth. You curve a hand around his hip, as lightly as you can.
He drops his hands to your shoulders, his thumbs pattering. “Cubs or White Sox?” he asks you seriously.
You draw a total blank for a second, not understanding that even a little bit, and he winds a fist in the material of your T-shirt, bumps you on the shoulder. “You said you were from Chicago. So, Cubs or Sox?”
Your index finger fishhooks in one of his belt loops. He’s warm and right there in front of you. “White Sox,” you tell him softly.
He sighs. His eyes are still insolent but you find you kind of like that now. “’s too bad,” he murmurs. “I’ma play for the Padres, so we won’t see each other hardly ever.”
You nod, wide-eyed, feeling like you’ve suffered a blow to the head. “Too bad.”
He smiles and you think he’s gonna kiss you again, but what he does instead, he just leans in and presses his face against your neck for one clean moment, and then he’s gone, sliding between your palms and out the door of the equipment shed and the sunlight sluices in, staggering you and making you blind.
THE END
It's been a most excellent day. Bring on the Rangers and bring on the Brewers and keep one burning.
Man, tell ya a story about how I quite literally stopped biting my nails on Friday, mainly cos my fingers were all bloody and painful all the time and I didn't have any nails to get a good cigarette-flick off, and nothing nothing nothing like a 1-0 victory to test the limits of a kid's willpower, dude, nothing like it.
Oh, my boy's a gamer, you know it's true. When T-rex (if you're confused by this nickname, take a look at Durazo's arms, which barely come past his waist, and be enlightened as to how he is a prehistoric thunderlizard who says GRRRRRRRR!) hit that dinger, I thought it was just the start, but it turned out not to even matter, yo.
What, by the way, is UP with Dotel's insistence on putting at least ONE runner on in his every appearance? Like, cheers for getting the save, O.D., but could you not give a kid a heart attack in the process! Jeez, the game was nerve-wracking enough.
Oh, but Zeet, my dear dear Zeet. How many strikeouts? TEN! Season high! Everybody in the stadium got a free 2 liter of Pepsi (which happens every time A's pitcher fan 8, best promotion ever). And he was striking them out with high fastballs, which was, like, ridiculously weird, because high heat's one thing, but 88 mph high heat is also known as 'merry christmas, batter,' but man, he had them just tied up. It was so great.
I am thrilled. Bonds is one away, baby! My Giants have taken over the wild card lead, after much scrapping to get there. The five-team mess in NL is ridic. But you know what, fuck the wild card. We're gonna catch the Dodgers, it's gonna be miraculous. Better believe it. All my boys are tough like nails, they cannot be stopped.
Joyous.
*
Okay, so a little while ago I found out that one Mark Mulder and one Barry Zito just happened to play in the Cape Cod Baseball League the same summer, '97 when they were both nineteen.
It was basically like God coming down from heaven and saying, "Hey, Candle, please write a story about your boys when they were shiny new and younger'n hell."
And far be it for me to refuse the requests of the good Lord.
Back in the Day
By Candle Beck
So it’s the summer of 1997 and that means you’re in Cape Cod.
Only the best college players go to the Cape Cod Baseball League, it’s famous like that, historic. You’re all out of place on the East Coast, nothing’ll stand still for you.
Yeah, well, whatever.
You don’t really know him, not until he steals your raincoat on accident.
You play on different teams, you with the Bourne Braves, red caps with yellow brims, and he’s with the Wareham Gateman, maroon jerseys and stitched white letters and no one seems to know what a Gateman is, anyway.
He’s real popular, around the league, but nobody calls him by his right name. He’s ‘deuce,’ mainly, that dropkick of a curve, silly cartoonish hook, making your own twelve-to-six break feel cold and professional, unremarkable. Also they call him ‘California,’ though there’s a bunch of guys out from the West Coast, but he gets the honor of the name ‘cause you can spot him coming a mile off, with his brushing long hair and the braided hemp necklace he wears with the zing of a blue glass bead rattling around in the hollow at the base of his throat.
Lots of the guys, they’re not taking this too seriously. You can pick them out, the ones who every night haunt the alley behind the liquor store that doesn’t card, the ones who stumble in for team meetings messy-eyed and high-pitched giggling, higher’n kites.
You’re vaguely scornful, though of course to each his own, but this is a serious thing, an honest thing, this game and this league, and if they’re good enough to be here, then they shouldn’t fuck it up by . . . getting fucked up.
But maybe you’re just a pussy.
Anyway, you know he smokes pot, too, dealt a bit early on before his supply ran low, and that’s even stupider-looking like a stoner and then going ahead and being a stoner too. At least he shouldn’t live up to stereotypes like that.
And once you saw him behind the Coastway Diner, blocky Dumpster shadows and crumbling gray stone, and he had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, smoking shamefully with patches of color on his cheeks that were either guilt or the lingering heat-blush of the lighter flame.
That was incongruent, and stopped you dead in your tracks a little bit. He’s such a latter-day hippie and latter-day hippies can smoke pot, but not cigarettes. Especially not latter-day hippies trying to pass themselves off as serious athletes. Or even just pitchers.
But he looked right with a cigarette burning steady, his eyes cast far off. He looked cool. It made you flush, made you feel stutters on your tongue again, and he didn’t even know you were there. You ducked away, off with your friends and left him alone.
Anyway. You don’t really know him.
He pitches against your team sometime in late June and just shuts you the fuck down. You don’t play that day, you can’t do anything but watch it from the bench. You realize then that the curve, as good as it is, honestly the curveball means shit. It’s change of speed, it’s the way he slots the change-up same as the fastball. It’s trickery, man, misdirection.
He’s laughing with his infielders and punching his catcher affectionately on the chest protector with his mitt and his hair keeps slipping free of his cap, rustling over his ears and skimming the collar of his jersey. You kind of like the look of him, though he’s really just a punk kid, end of the day, nothing much more than that. He’s not gonna come to anything, smoking cigarettes behind the diner and selling pot in his swear-to-God tie-dyed fucking T-shirts, like, jesus, dude.
And when you file out to slap fives with Wareham after the solid trouncing, you see him up close for the first time and for some weird reason you think, ‘goddamn flake’ with a flash of brief jagged anger.
He’s got these insolent eyes. The first time you think that, you shake it off, ‘cause ‘insolent,’ that’s a grown-up’s word, a substitute teacher’s word, and you’re not even street legal yet. You’re too chill to think about other guys like that, you’re laidback and easy-going and all that good shit, and you got no cause to be thinking of other guys as ‘insolent.’
Oughta be, you oughta be thinking of him as tough shit or hardcore, you with your stubborn allegiance to the bad guys in movies who get all the best lines and swing left hooks as rough and pretty as that fucking curveball of his. But there’s a petulance behind his gaze that even all your bad-idea arrogance can’t quite ignore.
Whatever, you don’t really know him. You’re not even sure about his real name, he’s just that kid from California, so fuck it.
Then it rains for a week straight and all the games are cancelled. It’s this strange humid rain, sea-smelling and thick with ozone, rolling down the streets in clouds like boulders, and you spend a lot of time drinking Rolling Rock (not a hypocrite; fucked up on the weekends, when the games are rained out, that’s fine) and trying to find someone in the league from New England who can confirm that this kind of weather in the middle of the summer is in no way fucking normal.
You’re way too tall and you can count your ribs through a sweatshirt, wicket-skinny with these big shoulders just waiting for muscle, hands that can cover a newspaper page, papercuts on your thumb. They call you ‘Chicago.’ Hometowns are a big deal in the Cape League. It’s a lot like college, except the question everybody asks after where you from is who you gonna play for?
Chicago White Sox, man. Goddamn right.
Anyway, it rains and it rains a lot, buckets, cats and dogs, sheets and blankets, and there’s this big party, or gathering-type-thing, over at Chris-from-Mississipp’s house.
Obviously, not his actual house, instead the house of his three-month foster parents who’ve ill-advisedly left town for the weekend, but it shakes out about the same.
Seems like most of the CCBL is there, orbiting around the keg in the backyard and the Playstation in the living room. You keep catching glimpses of him, rioted hair and his face that you keep thinking is pretty like a girl’s, but really it’s not, not girlish at all, just a boy’s face, a very pretty boy’s face, and every time you think that you take another shot.
You don’t go for guys, okay. He’s just annoying, an itch right between your shoulder blades where you can’t reach, he’s got caught on the edge of your perception like lint, but that doesn’t mean nothing.
It’s still raining and somebody’s yelling about the movie Bull Durham, saying they should go run the bases, slide headfirst across the mud, waterplaning. Crazy drunk motherfuckers.
You can kind of hear him in the corner of your mind, hollering, “No I didn’t bring a motherfucking raincoat, since when’s it supposed to rain in motherfucking July,” and you’re drunk enough to laugh until you almost cry at that for some reason, though it’s not all that funny.
He passes out in the hallway early, nineteen years old and more used to pot than liquor, and you don’t remember kneeling down and draping your blue raincoat over him, tucking the collar around his shoulders and folding his hand around one of the empty sleeves, and he sighs and noses against the material, snuffling and a long-way smile breaking quietly on his face.
You sprint home through the rain at three in the morning, knock-down drunk and brilliantly happy.
You wake up the next morning freezing cold, your clothes stuck to you like cellophane, your skin pale and clammy. Shivering, you peel everything off and hop into the shower and make it as hot as you can stand, jerking off ritualistically and not thinking about insolence or pretty stoner boys from California.
Your three-months foster dad makes you pancakes and squints at the blue blue sky out the kitchen window, saying, “Guess you’ll get a chance to play today, huh.” Your mouth’s full, so you just nod and gulp some orange juice. He half-grins at you, tells you in one breath that the Red Sox beat the Yankees last night and don’t forget to call home.
You get out to Eldredge Park, the wind blowing in from the west, the white-light sun strumming through you, and the world is scrubbed clean, gleaming. You play odds-evens with your teammates to see whose turn it is for equipment duty. You come up short, which fucking sucks and throws you off, ‘cause you felt real lucky today, like, untouchable. Nothing to be done for it, though, so you trod off to the equipment shed, which is pretty much just a sweat box, a sweat box crawling with daddy long legs and century-old dust and water-rotted wooden planks bristling with gray splinters.
You’re bent awkwardly over a small mountain of umpire padding, craned and twisted with your arm digging behind the bat rack, clawing out loose baseballs, when a spear of pale light snags across your chest, the equipment shed door edged open.
Trying to look over, you lose your balance, tripping on a facemask and sprawling full-out on your back, sneezing fiercely with your eyes screwed shut because there are bellows of filthy dust clouds rising around your body.
Somebody makes a sound a lot like a muffled laugh, and you’re three steps beyond irritated, grimy and you’ve got dust in your eyes even though your eyes are fucking closed, so you snarl blindly, darting a hand out and catching an ankle, the tight soft casing of a uniform sock. Before you can drag the intruder down to the ground with you, teach him to fucking laugh, a hand snatches your wrist out of nowhere and hauls you to your feet again, sliding up to your upper arm and keeping you steady.
You wipe the back of your forearm across your face and spit dirt to the side. Your eyes water thickly and your mouth feels coated and you blink fast, swallow.
He’s standing there with his stupid dark eyes and a mocking grin on his face, and you’d probably hit him anyway but he’s wearing your raincoat over his uniform, which is enough to make you pause, confused.
“Dude,” he says, fixing his face solemnly.
You nod, suspicious. “Dude,” you answer, all cautious and distrustful.
He swipes at your shoulder and you feint backwards, fists half-raised, but he’s just batting off some of the dust. You grunt in acknowledgement and drum your hands over your arms and chest, coughing. He grins, but only for a second.
“Nice coat,” you say sarcastically.
He lifts his arm, and you see that your raincoat is too big on him, which makes you feel better about the whole situation. The sleeve hangs several inches past his fingertips, and he flaps it around, looking like a first grader in a hand-me-down. He smiles, a row of perfect orthodontic-straight teeth, the spitting image of an all-american boy who never forgets to drink his milk at dinner.
“Woke up at Chris’s wrapped up in it,” he explains, still waving the sleeve around like a flag.
You scratch your head and don’t answer, eyeing him skeptically. You don’t remember covering him up with it, right, on your knees beside his passed-out body and nearly losing your balance.
“Chris’opher said it was yours,” he continues, dropping consonants, talking lazy and you’re not sure if that’s a California thing or a pothead thing. Or both, hell.
You nod. “Yeah, true.” You hold out your hand for it, your face smeared with dust and your warm-up T-shirt stuck to the small of your back, the sweat on your forearms making your skin slick and shiny.
But he doesn’t strip the raincoat off. He hugs himself a little bit, threads his thumb through a buttonhole and waggles it around. “This is a good coat. It’s real . . . soft. Like, broke in. Yeah? I been wearing it all day.”
You narrow your eyes, unsure how to take that. Nobody you know talks like that, all upfront and admitting things that’ll maybe sound weird.
You’re, like, fascinated by his hair. It’s matted on one side and sticking up frayed on the other, and you have this bizarre urge to push it down with your hand, feel it spring up under your palm.
It’s pretty dim in the equipment shed, a single musty light bulb hanging like a noose in the corner, so his eyes look sunk way back in his face, and he’s still too pretty for his own good and really, you gotta stop thinking about him as ‘pretty,’ ‘cause that shit’s only gonna get you into trouble.
You clear your throat, your tongue feeling all swollen, like it doesn’t fit in your mouth, trying to sound appropriately annoyed as you say impatiently, “Well, I can give you the name of the store where my ma bought it, but it won’t do you much good unless you happen to be in Chicago. Can I have it back now?”
He looks up, angling his face into the light and he studies you for a long moment with those brat’s eyes, and you want to squirm under the inspection, feeling laid open, warmth rising to your face and you don’t know what to do with your too-big hands, feeling stupid and nervous and way overheated, which you blame on this fucking sweat box of an equipment shed and nothing more.
He grins.
He just busts out this cocky fucking grin, all i-know-something-you-don’t, all thought-you-had-me-fooled-you-thought-wrong, all i-see-right-fucking-through-you, and then he steps close, chest to chest all of a sudden and you suck in a breath so sharp it whistles between your teeth.
“Hey,” he says low, his voice not much more than a rumble. You swallow hard and his pupils are as big as dimes, which is maybe the faded light in here and maybe the jay he smoked before he came out to the ballpark today and maybe something else entirely, and he raises his hand, touches your throat, just his fingertips on your Adam’s apple so that when you swallow hard for the second time, his hand bobs up and down, and he’s got this creepy little smile on his face now.
“The fuck?” you manage, sounding hoarse and choked to your own ears, sounding embarrassingly turned on, which you most certainly are not, though if that sinking feeling pooling low in your stomach is any indication, you will be soon enough, and you’d really rather him not be this close if that’s gonna be the case.
It’s not him, you’re nineteen years old, random hard-ons still happen. Swear.
His mouth twists interestingly, and you probably shouldn’t be watching his mouth. “Hey,” he whispers again, and he leans forward, and you panic, yank yourself backwards, and of course you trip and fall down again, of course you do.
You tumble backwards onto the pile of ump’s chest protectors and crack your elbow a good one on the bat rack and yelp in pain. You curl your arm against your chest and when you realize he’s laughing, when you realize he’s honest-to-God nearly crying with laughter, arms wrapped round his stomach and howling with it, you see red and sweep-kick his legs out from under him and he topples like a tree, landing all elbows and knees right on top of you.
Your wind is gone and he’s still laughing, hiccupping and wheezing and squirming slowly on top of you, and your face must be the color of a fire truck because you’re as hard as hell and there is no way he doesn’t know that, at this point.
He sneezes against your neck and he’s snickering as his one hand snakes up behind your neck and his other worms between your bodies and then he’s laughing and mouthing your collarbone and stammering, “Smooth, so smooth, wow,” and jerking your belt open and your raincoat is fanned out over the both of you like a tent and you’re shaking like a kid, your hands high on his sides, fingers jigsawed into the dents of his ribs through his jersey, and his crazy hair sweeping across your face.
He’s got a hand down the front of your pants and squirrels up your body, knocking his chin against your jaw kinda painfully and licking your ear and kissing all over your face before he finally locates your mouth, and then it’s all tongue and teeth and you cursing without breath. He’s messily enthusiastic about making out, but his hand knows what it’s doing, gripped and hot and stroking gasps out of you, and somewhere your shirt gets tugged out of your pants and you can feel the cool slippery material of your own raincoat on the skin of your stomach.
You can’t seem to stop kissing him and your hands are in his hair, smoothing through it and trying to plaster it down and petting him all over. He shimmies happily atop you and you suck on his neck, dragging your hands down his body and hooking your fingers in his belt loops, locking his hips with yours and his hand stuck between the two of you, wriggling like a netted fish.
This is all very junior high school dry-humping, but it’s also definitely kind of awesome.
You’re feeling on top of the world and not very heterosexual at all, because you want to suck this guy’s dick and leave marks all over him and maybe even find out his real name, but mostly you just want him to keep kissing you like that, dirty like a porn star and sweet like a best friend, and you manage to pop three buttons getting his jersey open and you press your mouth to his bare chest and taste salt on your tongue, and then you come all over his hand and your body goes limp, panting.
He pushes against your hip, grinding a little bit, making these throaty noises that are almost a whole new kind of laughter, mumbling, “c’mon, c’mon,” and you weakly try to help him out, hiking your hips up and looking for a rhythm, and it must be good enough because a minute or two later he freezes, shudders, and lets himself collapse on top of you, heavy boy-weight and that obnoxious hair of his is stranded on your tongue, you spitting dryly.
You lie there for awhile, catching your breath, one of your arms around his back, under his open jersey and your blue raincoat. He’s breathing deep and hot into the crook of your neck and shoulder and you hope that he hasn’t fallen asleep. Your heart is ricocheting around, hammering, and you can feel the trembling muscles of his stomach against your own.
You blink wonderingly up at the cracks in the equipment shed roof, threads of clean sky, and the skewed sideshow wires of light from the single bulb and you’re not thinking this through very clearly, because you’re really just feeling so fucking good.
From way far off, you can hear the muffled sounds of your team beginning practice, out on the field, and that’s something that should definitely get you moving, but Christ, you might be about to fall asleep yourself, and fuck getting caught.
Then you remember seeing this good kid from California smoking behind the diner and how that’s such a dumb thing for a serious ballplayer to be doing, so risky, and you realize that there’s nothing more risky about that than there is about lying in a state of varied undress with a random fucking guy who’s not even a teammate in the equipment shed of Eldredge Park.
You scratch your nails on his back, making him hum and burrow his face deeper into your neck. You poke at his head with your other hand, making noises to indicate that he should probably get up now and stuff.
He murmurs in discontent, but pushes off you, rolling away and sitting up and looking around blearily. You get up on your elbows and yeah, this is gonna get awkward, pretty soon now.
Your eyes want to attach themselves to the bare strip of his chest, the hatch marks of your teeth, warm skin toasted from the Pacific sun, but you’re blushing pretty bad now and so you just pull your gaze away, go about the business of fixing your pants and belt, stuffing your shirt back in.
He’s scooted to sit with his back against the wall, watching you and his face is closed off like a door’s been shut, deadbolted. You’ve finished getting yourself back in order and now you don’t know what to do.
You stare down at your hands, you wish for a baseball to fiddle with, but reaching to get one would be a little too obvious.
“Can I keep your raincoat?”
Your eyes dart up, strung with dim ringing fear, off-balance because his voice sounds so goddamn normal. He’s fingering the hem of the raincoat; his jersey’s still open.
Your mouth’s all dry and your mind feels fuzzy, disconnected. “Uh . . . sure. Yeah, sure,” you answer dumbly, some weird paranoid part of your brain thinking that the only reason he stuck his hand down your pants was ‘cause he wanted you to give him your raincoat.
He grins. “Cool. Thanks.”
His fingers go to the buttons of his jersey, and you surprise yourself by asking, “What’s your name?” You wince because having to ask that question of someone you just teenage-fucked probably isn’t the most upstanding thing that’s ever happened to you.
He gives you a look, still half-smiling. You try to echo it, ha-ha-we’re-all-cool-guys-here, but the attempt feels lame. “Barry,” he replies, and you almost expect him to hold out his hand for you to shake, but he doesn’t.
You regard him uncertainly. “Like, for real?”
He cocks his head to one side. “Of course for real. That’d be a weird thing to lie about.”
You think that telling someone what your name is, in a situation like this, is actually a pretty good thing to lie about, but you don’t tell him that. You shrug. You just got a handjob from a boy named Barry. Crazy world.
“I just never met anybody named that before.”
He nods, and shifts a little bit so that his outstretched leg nudges against your knee. “And you’re Mark.”
He knew your name the whole time. You almost smile, but bite it back at the last second. He knows your name, big fucking deal, quit acting like a fourteen year old girl. But you’re blushing with pleasure, you can feel the burn in your ears, washing down your neck.
“I’m Mark,” you agree.
He knocks your knee with his leg, grinning. “I know probably seven hundred guys named Mark.”
You pull up an eyebrow, spike him with a look. “That mean you’re not gonna remember me?”
He rolls his eyes. “Yeah, you’re pretty forgettable. Except for, you know, totally not at all.”
You can’t help it-you grin back at him like an idiot.
You sit like that for awhile, getting back under control, and he stands first, offering you a hand and pulling you up. He brushes his hands down your chest, breezing the dust off, lifts both hands to your head to sculpt your hair, his eyes narrowed in concentration and a little pink triangle of his tongue sticking out the corner of his mouth. You curve a hand around his hip, as lightly as you can.
He drops his hands to your shoulders, his thumbs pattering. “Cubs or White Sox?” he asks you seriously.
You draw a total blank for a second, not understanding that even a little bit, and he winds a fist in the material of your T-shirt, bumps you on the shoulder. “You said you were from Chicago. So, Cubs or Sox?”
Your index finger fishhooks in one of his belt loops. He’s warm and right there in front of you. “White Sox,” you tell him softly.
He sighs. His eyes are still insolent but you find you kind of like that now. “’s too bad,” he murmurs. “I’ma play for the Padres, so we won’t see each other hardly ever.”
You nod, wide-eyed, feeling like you’ve suffered a blow to the head. “Too bad.”
He smiles and you think he’s gonna kiss you again, but what he does instead, he just leans in and presses his face against your neck for one clean moment, and then he’s gone, sliding between your palms and out the door of the equipment shed and the sunlight sluices in, staggering you and making you blind.
THE END
It's been a most excellent day. Bring on the Rangers and bring on the Brewers and keep one burning.