Five-hundred-and-fifty-nine, five-hundred-and-sixty –
Whenever I wait for something, I count the seconds and imagine that however high I count will be the number of home runs I’ll hit when I’m in the Major Leagues. Usually I get to around nine-hundred-and-fifty, which is okay with me because it’s more than Babe Ruth’s seven-hundred-and-fourteen and Hank Aaron’s seven-hundred-and-fifty-five, even more than what Josh Gibson would’ve hit if he had gotten to play in the Majors. I don’t count Barry Bonds’ seven-hundred-and-sixty-two home runs because he took steroids and that’s cheating. Sometimes in the morning when it’s time for school I’ll only get to four-hundred, but when Mom has Grunt over in her room I’ll get up to around two-thousand-and-four-hundred before we leave the apartment. But I know I’ll never hit that many home runs.
Of course, his name isn’t really Grunt – it’s Grant – but once Mom’s door closes that’s all he seems to do anyway. They’ve been seeing each other for a little less than a year or so, but he calls her Honey and sometimes they kiss in front of me. He wears a leather bomber jacket and his breath always smells like coffee, even when it’s night. I don’t call him Grunt to his face. I don’t think he’d like it very much.
Five-hundred-and-seventy-one, five-hundred-and-seventy-two –
I’m sitting on the couch, fiddling with my baseball pants and knee-high socks that I like to pull up so I can look like the retro players. Not many Major Leaguers do it like that anymore, and it looks kind of stupid the way their pants sag at the ankles. Mom and Grunt are in her room, watching TV or something. They’d better get ready soon, because I really can’t be late for my game.
Mom writes for the Home section of the New York Times and we live in an apartment on the third floor of a four-story walkup on One-Hundred-and-Sixteenth Street and Second Avenue, a few blocks from where the awnings and doormen turn into Hispanic bodegas and older black men sitting on stoops. Mom has her bedroom and I have mine. My window faces East, which I like because the sun hits my face in the morning and wakes me up early enough so that I have time to play with my Legos before school. I make castles with fortifications, layers of gates and walls to guard the treasure in the center. When they are built, I leave them on the windowsill for a few days before I break them down – I only have so many Legos.
Five-hundred-and-eighty-three, five-hundred-and-eighty-four –
I hear Mom calling from the other room, saying James, are you ready, we’ve gotta go. I’ve been ready since five-hundred-and-eighty-four home runs ago, which is just barely short of getting me into the top ten sluggers of all time, right between Frank Robinson and Mark McGwire. I put my bat and my glove in my bag, pull my socks up to my knees, and make sure my cup is in place – Dad always used to tell me to protect the family jewels. Mom walks out of her bedroom with Grunt, who looks disgruntled, but I guess that’s the way he always looks regardless. Mom’s wearing her mom jeans. Dad always teased her about them. Her hair is put up in a ponytail, and as she gives me a kiss hello she tousles my hair like she usually does, which messes it up, but it’s fine because I like it messy. Plus, when it’s under my baseball cap it doesn’t matter anyway. She takes care to lock the door behind us, jangling her keys and humming to the tune of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” Grunt rolls his eyes. I glare at him and make a face. We are halfway down the stairs when I remember that I’ve forgotten something. “I need to go back!” I yell. I snatch Mom’s keys and sprint back up the stairs, down the hallway, through the front door, past the framed photograph of Dad that we keep on the table, and open up the box I keep under my bed. My Topps 2002 Mike Piazza baseball card is safely nestled in there, and I grab it, put the box back, lock the door, and run back to Mom and Grunt.
Grunt takes the card out of my hand and peers at the gold lettering. “Huh, you went all the way back for this?” he says. I snatch it back.
Before Dad died, he always said that Piazza was the spirit of New York City, especially after Nine-Eleven. I don’t tell this to Grunt.
We walk down into the One-Hundred-Tenth Street Subway station to get on the downtown six train and I notice that on the uptown side of the tracks, people are decked out in Yankees gear, wearing jerseys with the last names Jeter, Rivera, Rodriguez, Giambi, and Posada. I scowl. I’ve never liked the Yankees. All my friends who are Yankees fans tease me for being a Mets fan. The Yankees also lost the World Series on October 25th, 2003, the night that Dad died.
We get off at Eighty-Sixth Street and head across the Avenues towards Central Park. Grunt stops to get a small bag of sugary crystallized peanuts from a Nuts 4 Nuts stand on Lexington. They smell good, and Grunt offers me some. They are crunchy but still warm, a sweet, roasted flavor in the early fall morning air.
The first time I met Grunt, he took Mom and me to a diner near The East River, right off of East End Ave. I got a milkshake with burgers and fries. I think he wanted to get on my good side.
“So, James, you like sports?” he had asked.
“I guess just baseball.”
“Ah. Never liked baseball, always found it too slow. Never could sit through it. Now football – that’s a real man’s game.”
“Football doesn’t have half the technique of baseball.”
“Ah, well.”
He wasn’t a very good talker, more of a grunter I guess, if I’m being totally honest. I spent the rest of the meal making paper worms out of the straw wrappings and watched them unravel, lifelike, as I dripped drops of water on the soggy paper.
Mom takes a few minutes examining the window displays on Madison Avenue. I think they look too perfect and fake for anyone to actually buy anything in them. I ask if anyone actually buys anything in them, and Grunt says that only the really rich people do. I point to a leather bag and Mom guesses it probably costs two-thousand dollars. Two-thousand dollars! I’d rather have a nineteen-sixty-eight Nolan Ryan rookie card than a brown purse. Nolan Ryan’s fastest pitch was one-hundred-and-eight-point-one miles per hour, the fastest ever recorded. He had five-thousand-seven-hundred-and-fourteen career strikeouts – the Hank Aaron of pitchers.
I can smell the halal trucks, hot dog vendors, and ice cream stands as we near Fifth Avenue, a mixture of spicy and sweet. We walk past the Metropolitan Museum of Art, past the Temple of Dendur that Dad would bring me to on the weekends after tee-ball games and strawberry shortcake ice cream bars. The old temple was cool and all, but the thing I remember most was the T206 Honus Wagner card they had, housed in a glass case in a hallway of memorabilia. It was the rarest baseball card in the world, Dad had said, and told me that there were less than sixty in existence.
I cross the street into Central Park just as the streetlight says WALK, and Mom and Grunt hurry after me. It’s game time now, and I slide my bat out of the bag, whirling it around in the air. “Be careful sweetie,” Mom says. “You’ll hit someone.” Grunt grunts his agreement, but I pay no attention to them and hurry to field number eight, which is separated from the Great Lawn by the loop and is next to the basketball courts where guys are playing pickup. I can feel the surrounding buzz. Some people are lounging on the grass under the outer trees while others play frisbee, football, or soccer. Older men are getting way too into their softball games, and they yell “LOOK OUT!” if you get too close.
I beat Mom and Grunt to the field, lace up my cleats, and join the rest of my team in the outfield for warmups. We shag fly balls and run do-or-die drills, spitting David’s sunflower seeds on the grass. We underhand flip buckets of balls to each other, hitting them against the fence with a satisfying rattle every time. Coach Martin calls us over and tells us he’s posted the lineup in the dugout. I’m not starting, which is okay with me I guess because I never start anyway so my expectations were low to begin with. We break from our huddle and because we are the home team, the guys hustle out onto the field and I sit in the dugout, marking the plays on the scorecard like I usually do. I keep my head down. I don’t like seeing Mom crane her neck to see if today is the day I get to run out there with the rest of them.
Coach Martin is standing in the corner of the dugout, watching our pitcher and catcher intently, but I see him glance at me out of the corner of my eye, tentatively, and suddenly he turns and motions me over towards him.
“You know, James, I wanted to start you today, but it’s an important game and we need you doing your dugout duties, making sure the boys are all good to go.”
“Okay, coach. I understand.”
“I’ll see if we can get you in at some point.”
“Okay,” I say, and sit back down. I want what’s best for the team. But I know I’m better than Greg, the right fielder, who bats eighth and always either strikes out or hits a dribbler to the pitcher. I also know what Dad would say – that the best players paid their dues before they made it big league. I doubt that Hank Aaron ever sat on the bench, though.
While the game goes on, I rewrap my bat handle and teach myself to put three sunflower seeds in my mouth at the same time and shell them individually. I watch as the other team puts up three runs and we put up two, leaving two men on in both the fifth and sixth innings. Ducks on the pond, as Coach Martin calls them. I watch as Travis, our center fielder, trips while running down a fly ball and lets out a yell of pain as he catches it. The team hustles off the field, but Travis limps heavily, wincing with every step. Martin checks him out, tells him to ice his ankle and crosses his name off the lineup. He looks at me and says, “You’re in the hole.” I jump off the bench, grab my helmet and bat and weighted donut and start taking my practice swings. I don’t use batting gloves because neither does Moisés Alou and he’s in the middle of a twenty-five game hitting streak right now.
Mike is up to bat, and he takes an easy walk. Greg steps up to the plate, and in three straight pitches manages to whiff every single swing. Mike was able to steal on the second pitch. Now it’s me, with one out, man on second, losing three to two in the bottom of the seventh. I approach the batter’s box, digging my right cleat in so I can have better footing. Mom still hasn’t realized I’m in the game yet – she’s talking with Grunt and looking at the newspaper on her lap.
I can’t really blame her for not being very interested. I haven’t played in three games and she must get awfully bored. She always comes to my games, even the one the weekend after Dad died. It was back when we still batted off a tee. I don’t remember much from that game except the one at-bat I had when I couldn’t seem to even touch the ball, which was lying stationary on the stand. Whiff, whiff, whiff, and I remember her cheering hoarsely from the stands, her eyes saggy and red.
No whiffs today, though.
I glance across the field, where a young boy is playing catch with his dad. I can hear the sharp smack of ball against leather glove from hundreds of feet away.
“Make your arms into a T,” Dad had told me. “Point where you want to throw.” I had thrown it right at him and it hit his old mitt right in front of his chest. “Ow!” he’d exclaimed. “That one hurt!”
Now the pitcher comes to his set position. I clench my teeth and settle into my stance, rotating my bat in circles above my head. The pitcher winds up, throws, the ball a white blur. I let it go – it looks outside.
“Strike one!” the umpire calls. I think he’s wrong, but you never argue with the ump, maybe only ask him questions. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Mom nudging Grunt, motioning earnestly towards home plate. “Go James!” she yells and claps.
“Where’s Dad?” I had asked Mom in the afternoon on Nine-Eleven. She had taken me out of pre-school that morning. “He’s helping all of the people that are in trouble,” she had replied. “Rescue and recovery. He’ll be okay.”
She looked worried, though. When the door opened that night and it was Dad in the doorway, I remember how she clutched her chest like she thought it might explode. It was the same way Dad clutched his chest three years later when his lungs gave out, when they got scratchy and black from all the dust and dirt on Nine-Eleven and after so many tests the doctor said it was Cancer. Stage Four, he had said, which I didn’t understand at the time.
Now, I clutch my bat. Pitch two comes in higher than the last one, but inside. I still don’t swing.
“Strike two!” the ump calls, and my dugout erupts into angry cries from the players and the coach. Mom yells out. I don’t look at them. I step out of the batter’s box and clear my mind. I need to focus.
In the box under the couch in our apartment is a small envelope with a letter in it that had also once contained my Mike Piazza card in its plastic sleeve. The doctor gave it to me the day Dad died. He said it was on Dad’s bedside table and addressed to me. I have it memorized by heart, I’ve read it so many times.
Jame-o:
I wish you could fully remember the first baseball game in New York after 9/11. It was the Mets versus the Atlanta Braves, ten days after the Twin Towers fell and so many lives were lost. The two teams were bitter rivals, but for a short period of time, everyone stood together, waving American flags with their hands holding their caps over their hearts. I saw 30,000 people cry during the national anthem, and when it was done, chants of “USA! USA!” echoed around the stadium. It was late in the game when Piazza came up to bat. The score was 2-1 Braves and he swung for the fences. He swung for the city, for the dead and for the living. It was the home run heard around the world, a call of hope and freedom in the face of despair. It was resilience and celebration, it was light-in-the-dark believing.
It’s your turn to be Mike Piazza now, James. Be that hope for your mother.
All my love,
Dad
The windup, the pitch. The ball is hurled at me, trying to go past me, getting closer and closer. Do I swing? I know that the pitcher is probably trying to trick me, to give me his junk, to make me look stupid, to keep me on the bench. Expect curveball, adjust for fastball, Dad said. But I never prepare for the curveballs. No one ever really does. All I do is adjust to the disappointment after the whiffs, the bitter taste in my mouth, the lump in my throat. I see the pitch, bigger than it’s ever been before, and my hands move, my body twisting, my back heel squishing the bug, the bat exploding through the strike zone.
Clang. Not a crack, not the sound that it makes in the Majors when the whole stadium sits upright, ears perked to the wood-meets-leather smack, the sharp bite that pierces the crowd, not even the end-of-the-barrel clunk or the close-to-the-handle clink of a metal bat, but the sweet-spot clang of aluminum shock. The ball rockets through the air, over and between the heads of the left and center fielders, but I’m not looking. Dad always told me to run, run, run, never stop hustling, never look at your hit. Let the base coaches direct you, he said. So I run, taking the banana cut around first base, hitting my stride. I look up and see Tim, the third base coach, motioning for me to keep going. Mike passes home plate. I round second, panting now. I’m panting like Dad every time he laughed when I visited him in the hospital and told him jokes, his face grimacing with the effort of it, wheezing and sputtering, but smiling nonetheless. I’m panting like Mom when she couldn’t catch her breath through her sobs after the doctor told her Dad didn’t have much time left – a month, maybe, and I overheard it through the crack in his office door. I’m panting like when I ran down the hospital hallway away from the waiting room, where I had counted fourteen-thousand-and-four-hundred home runs before the doctor came out with a grim face, and Mom ran after me, crying James, James, James, but I couldn’t hear her or anything else in the world. I’m panting, and my heart is beating, and Coach Martin windmills his arm for me to run home, and I’m really booking it now, and the throw is close but I’m sliding feet first, and the catcher fumbles the ball like Mike Piazza never would have, and my cleats touch the plate before his glove touches my leg.
Safe! calls the umpire.
That’s one.