in an honest-to-God cesspool?
Chapter Nineteen
Although he had once promised himself he wouldn’t stay in the game if it meant celebrating his thirtieth birthday in a minor league town, he did: Holloway, Iowa. He was with the Cubs organization then, playing for their double-A team at Racine—his fifth franchise in less than three years; St. Louis, Cleveland, Oakland, Baltimore, Chicago, the trajectory of his career akin to a pinball bouncing off bumpers and flippers. He sometimes thought—back to hours on a bus and four-in-a-room at Travelodges and Motel 6s, deep in the heart of the heart of America, where, he was convinced, the only people who were there had gotten lost on their way to somewhere else—that the worst thing that had happened to him were the weeks he’d spent with the Cardinals until he got hurt. It was as if he had been tussling in the backseat with the prom queen: she was passionate, she let you touch her here, here, here, but not there, not just yet, before she dashed off to the powder room, just for a sec, just to freshen up, leaving you waiting with a hard-on, wondering, did she ditch you, was she laughing with her friends, the queen’s court, about leaving you there, but then thinking that maybe she didn’t after all, and you remember your hand in her bra, and maybe she was standing at the sink, dabbing the corner of her mouth to smooth out the line of lip gloss, thinking about you in the car, and so you waited, the promise enough to keep you waiting in the backseat as the moon set.
In the hinterlands of the Cleveland organization after the tryout camp—Erie, Pennsylvania, hitting .293—he was the number four outfielder and should have read the portents then: the prom queen doesn’t come back to the car for number four outfielders. The next year, back at Erie—never a good sign, two seasons in the same minor league town, the professional version of your tires caught in the mud, spinning—and then later that season traded to the A’s, at Peoria, Illinois, three weeks there, a throw-in as part of a seven-player deal, hitting .413 in forty-six at-bats, but then shipped out again, to the Baltimore organization, playing at Raleigh but then let go when the season ended, the market cold for twenty-nine-year-old singles-hitting outfielders. He should have read the signs then but didn’t, the last man in America who still had faith he could get back to the major leagues. So he stuck it out, made some calls, landed with a Cubs minor league team, and woke up starting the fourth decade of his life in a little town he couldn’t pick out on a map even though he’d been there.
At the ball game at Holloway, the organist played “The Old Gray Mare” when he stepped to the plate for the first time, and a drunken fan in the stands behind home plate shrieked the words of the song at him—a red-faced man maybe twice his age, venting whatever his life’s disappointments were on someone he didn’t know, as if it would bring him back whatever he had lost. When Edward Everett struck out, swinging wildly over a pitch that broke down and outside, the old man jeered at him: “Yeah, you go sit down now.”
After the game, at a Ponderosa, one of his teammates tipped a waitress—a buxom girl with steak sauce and chocolate pudding staining her apron—to bring him a corn muffin with a candle stuck in it, along with a note calling him “Mithoosla,” which took him a while to tease out as “Methuselah.” Looking down the table as they grinned back at him over their steaks and their baked potatoes slathered with sour cream, he realized how much older he was than they, thirty an impossible number for them to comprehend. A decade earlier, when he was their age and at single-A, still on his way up—up the only conceivable trajectory—and his hitting coach marked his thirtieth birthday (in a far more dignified manner than Edward Everett would; his wife and daughter meeting him at the ballpark, the daughter shyly offering up to him a package wrapped in paper she’d colored herself), another player confided, his face solemn, “I’m killin’ myself the day before I turn thirty.”
In his kitchen nearly a third of a century after that dinner at Ponderosa, taking the lasagna from the microwave and raising the steaming plastic dish as a toast to his sleeping dog,