Class A (42 page)

But Nick Franklin is small right now, and alone. And he doesn’t want his parents hovering near him with hugs and reminders. He doesn’t want the plane ride in a few hours to somewhere else. It is simple, manufactured nostalgia, that silly thing that I feel all the time, that thing best felt by the young who don’t have enough moments strung together to remind themselves that there is something more important than the place being left. It’s that swell of crushing emptiness that makes the insignificant seem anything but.

He says, kind of to nobody, “This was a good team.”

There are all kinds of things wrong with this sentence. The team still is, so if he has decided to label it good, it remains so. Though maybe, to read him cynically, the idea is that the team was good until he left it. Which is kind of true. But how good has this team been? Seventy-four and sixty-five, ten games out of first place, a four-game losing streak to end the season, benefiting because the winner of the first half of the season is also leading the second half and one team can’t take two play-off spots. A general apathy toward all these facts. And Nick himself, in his last at bat today, record already in hand, two outs in the ninth, had a chance to help clinch the play-offs, but he struck out on three pitches.

I think of us in the clubhouse a couple of days ago, before he trotted out to the field, last to make his entrance, as always. He was alone except for my half presence, casually shining his cleats. I asked him if it would be hard to leave this place—friends, fans, his older, midwestern girlfriend who he met after a game in Peoria, Illinois. He told me, “A little.” Leaving is hard, but you have to look at it as moving on. And the girlfriend, she was a perfect Single-A girlfriend, he would remember her fondly, but a AAA girl would be something else entirely. Leaving, he said, is almost always improving.

But not now. He doesn’t think that right now. Everything means so much right now. Half a year of not so many years was lived here. People loved him here. He lived with roommates here, shared rented TVs with four other guys, rode in the back of shitty cars like mine to dive bars, was served illegal drinks by smoky-voiced bartenders who told him they liked his fancy diamond earring, that it made him look like a rap star. He will not be loved like this anywhere else. Not really. Maybe if he becomes a major-league superstar, he will be known to the nation, the world, but it will be a diffuse love, and, anyway, that situation probably won’t happen. He’ll probably be a mediocre big-league infielder for a decade or so, make more money than I’ll ever see, the kind of money that could buy Alliant Energy Field and all the riverfront property around it, everything in town that isn’t a factory. He’ll probably fuck women in clinging dresses who have waited for his team in the marble lobby of hotels much grander than the Pzazz! FunCity. He’ll probably
do commercials for local car dealerships. He’ll probably have a kid, and all his kid’s friends will be jealous of the father he lucked into.

This is likely to be the last time he will be a record breaker.

Joyce has all of Nick’s remains in hand for the first round of the play-offs, half brag, more of a good luck charm. There’s a pair of his socks, ripped and unwearable, still with his sweat in the fibers and stadium dirt from a dive that must have been magnificent behind second base. There’s an armband tossed to her after a home win. And an old hat, and a jersey, and a bat that he splintered, his branded signature still intact on the barrel, the imprint of his fingers still visible in the pine tar smudge. She is overshadowed, though, by Derek, who has his sleeves rolled up to his shoulders to expose upper-arm flesh that is nothing but pale and doughy except for his tattoo of Nick’s signature, just like the one on Joyce’s bat. Just like the one seen a lot of places. Go to eBay, type in “Nick Franklin Card.” The number of results fluctuates from day to day, but the pool never dries up. As I type, a window on my screen displays 287 items, most of them with a picture of his face for sale, all of them with his name. You can get a plain old card, with his signature unraised, obviously a printout copy. That’ll run you ninety-nine cents. There are limited-edition cards that cost eight bucks, and cards signed by Nick Franklin himself—authenticity guaranteed—those can get up to eighty bucks. There are stranger items for sale, pricier and more specific, sold by those with Joyce’s proclivities but without her belief in anti-commerce. Some guy from across the river in Illinois got his hands on a real-deal lineup card from last month, got the players who might be worth something to sign over their printed names—Nick, Vinnie Catricala, a fourth-rounder named Max Stassi from Kane County. They’re worth a hundred dollars when bundled together.

“I’ve got him on my
skin
,” Derek says. “And it hurt like a bitch, but it’s never going anywhere.”

His fiancée has started coming to the games with him again but still rolls her eyes when he mentions the thing. She doesn’t get it at all. Why should she?

Joyce says, “I wouldn’t have the nerve. I don’t like needles”

She smiles, then looks down. She rummages in her bag for something, doesn’t find it, stops.

After the season, I still go to Joyce’s house every month or so. She shows me her things and I like her excitement and she likes that I like it. We sit down and watch TV, and the cat paces. Usually, she’s picked up something new to show. Sometimes she has a present for me. A Louie the LumberKing fridge magnet. A little holiday card on which she’s written nothing but
125 days until opening day!
Sometimes I get her presents, too. I was on vacation with my girlfriend, wandering through a consignment shop in geriatric Florida. I found a mini-bat in the back of the store, hidden in a pile of children’s gloves, left sneakers with no right, a Frisbee dedicated to the fire department of a town I’ve never heard of. The bat was faded. There was half the face of a mascot I couldn’t recognize. It was dated 1991, made the year Clinton won, the year Nick Franklin was born, the year Joyce started working at the casino thinking she’d someday leave, a collection of coincidences that mean nothing but still comfort me because there can be a pattern to things if you want there to be.

I tell Joyce a story, and then it becomes co-authored. Nick Franklin went upstairs to his hotel room alone before he and his parents drove away from Burlington, up 61 to Clinton, packed his clothes by midnight, slid out past the industrial sprawl in the early morning. He told his mother and father to stay put, leaving them to tell me all the bullshit things that they thought I needed to hear—how grateful the family is for the chance, how all Nicky wanted to do was be part of a team. He left to find Hank. Nick stayed up there a long time, just the two of them talking, his parents looking at their watches in the lobby, his father finally bolting to the parking lot to let the rental car’s A/C run for a while.

“It must have been like talking to his older brother,” Joyce says.

“They really get close here,” she continues.

“I bet he thanked him,” I say, not knowing. But Hank was so important to him.

“I bet he said, ‘See you soon,’ ” she says. “That’s what they say to each other because it’s nice to hear.”

We go on like that, batting one-sentence proclamations back and
forth, making the scene, off-season archival baseball footage on the TV in the background, unwatched for the moment.

Their phones were buzzing, neither of them picking up. Finally, an embrace. Maybe an exchange of a token. That must have happened. A wristband or a piece of paper with a note on it, something for Hank to keep.

We sit in her dining room, where nobody dines. My allergies are acting up because of the cat. The carpet isn’t helping, neither is the lack of airflow, windows never opened, vacuum never sucking up the things hidden in the cracks. I sneeze and my eyes are beginning to water, streaks of defensive tears running into the creases between nose and cheek. She looks at me, hopeful, head cocked, eyes ready to empathize.

“Are you okay?” she asks. “I know, it’s a lot.”

I’m not exactly sure what
“it”
is. I think
“it”
might mean the end of a season, the talk of Nick now gone. Or maybe it’s the experience of looking at all these names from all these season, stacked floor to ceiling, trinkets of the past looming over us in the present. I want to be really crying for her. “I can’t wait for opening day,” she says. “I don’t like this town as much in the winter. It seems like there’s less people every year.”

I will be going to spring training next year and Joyce won’t. She asks me to take things for her. She asks me to take the stories she’s written to those she’s written about. She has Nick’s story ready, not just in her omnipresent red notebook, but typed up in a nice bold font on a nice clean sheet of paper. She’ll put it in a blue envelope for me, with polka dots. She bought a big pack of polka-dot blue envelopes. She uses them for the players who she thinks will have a lot of mail to sift through. The ones who have become public property, no longer glad for attention. That is who Nick Franklin is now. She’s happy for him. She just wants to be remembered for her part, her shadow waiting by the fence to get signatures, her voice above all the others, her collection. And so Nick will get a blue polka-dot envelope from Joyce, different from the envelopes of all the other people who want to know him now. And there will also be a blue polka-dot envelope at the Texas Rangers’ spring-training facility, too, on a Santa Claus–sized pile of letters, a copy of the tale for Mitch Moreland to sign and send back, his signature confirming that he knows she saw him.

T
HE HOT TUB IN THE BLEACHERS
of Veterans Memorial Stadium in Cedar Rapids is empty but on, bubbles crashing into each other and fizzling out. The hot tub is perched over the left-field fence, meant to house parties of young, drunk fans who want to be seen. Right now, though, the most noticeable presence in the stands is the small but vocal Roadkill redux, all of whom have driven an hour and a half and will be driving the same again home at eleven on a work night. Joyce is here, of course, irked at the tepid home crowd that seems willing to only give lackluster claps during the deciding game of the first round of the Midwest League play-offs.

The most effusive I’ve seen Cedar Rapids fans was during a softball home run derby held before the national anthem of a game in July, entered by weekend warriors in specially made T-shirts repping autobody shops, custom decal services, divorce lawyers. I watched the field, heard kinetic noise behind me that did not fit what I was watching. I leaned on the fence behind home plate with Bose, the strength coach. We glared at the men on the field and laughed uneasily. They were enormous.

“Look at these pussies,” Bose said to me. I let my voice get cold and condescending, too, like, What kind of void are these clowns trying to fill getting one last afternoon of cheers? These local monsters could hit, though. Softballs like ostrich eggs went flying as far as a baseball can when the Nick Franklins of the world swing right. Each hitter was cheered with fervor, especially Scott, the best, who scowled in his bright orange uniform and had a collection of manic-grinning women holding signs in his honor. Terry Pollreisz sidled up next to us as we watched. The last time he hit in a game was during the Nixon administration, but
he sounded young and blustery and personally invested in the thought of being unintentionally shown up by another guy’s success when he said, “Hey, I’ll tell you something. I went in the office before the game and saw the staff freezing softballs so that they’d fly farther. So don’t get too impressed.”

We sneered and I wondered if Scott knew, if mammoth Scott was complicit in the lie of his greatness or if he hadn’t been told and thought that all the distance was supplied by his body that was no less than a pro’s. It didn’t matter. He was worshipped and people who cared about him were there to see his staged exploits and to wave their glitter-glue homemade signs as he posed with his plastic trophy.

Now the crowd energy that Scott basked in is absent. The real players are out limbering up for a crucial play-off game, and they are met with near silence, children’s sneakered feet running, the crunch of nacho chewing, the collective chuckling of people killing time. Erasmo is bouncing in anticipation on the top step of the dugout, jacket on even in the sticky heat. He is pitching tonight, what is surely the most important performance of his life by the metrics through which we are taught to look at team sports. This is a make-or-break game for a team on which he is a crucial member. Winners of this league get rings with gems in them and a write-up in the hometown paper of a place that is not their hometown. Erasmo, after a life’s training, has never actually pitched in a game like this, one with consequence, with a community of fans’ and teammates’ expectations resting on him, not just his own or his family’s, desires that aren’t actually tied to teams or victories. “Hey,” yells one autograph seeker who has wandered to the front row, the loudest voice in the stadium. “Hey, hey, hey, hey,” until Erasmo turns to him. And then, “Who the fuck are you?”

I’ve been reading pamphlets and interview transcripts from the Clinton Corn strike, saved on microfilm, converted into PDFs by a few loving hands. Not much documenting the conflict has been saved in Clinton, because why would there be? In the historical society’s illustrated history of the town, there are a few pictures of angry-looking picketers with a caption saying, “Many claim that today’s economic problems in Clinton are a direct result of that strike,” but that’s where the story ends.
In state historical societies and university libraries, Clinton is defined, if at all, by two moments. There is the invariable blurb about the lumber and the millionaires, such happy and unexpected facts, and then a jump right to 1979 and 1980, the years taken as the town’s last stand and a metaphor for an entire part of the country, an entire way of life.

I have a copy of the document that Clinton workers wrote to remember themselves, forty pages of reassertion that this place is important. “A Year in Our Lives” is the simple title. Of course I flip right to the page with the pictures of proud, organized protest taking place in the stadium, no players on the field, just workers. I look for Bill and Betty and Tim and Tammy in the pictures, as if they’ll be where they always are, by the third-base line, maybe even laying out free candy for the strikers to take home. I don’t see them, though they were there, somewhere, I think they’ve told me that. Or maybe I’m looking at them, but I don’t recognize who I’m seeing.