(Not That You Asked) (19 page)

Young Bull’s phone rang and he gazed into the tiny blue screen. “It’s my dad!” He flipped open the phone and began speaking as if he were five years old. “Wasn’t it beautiful, Dad? I know! Gosh! I’m so happy!” Down the porch steps he wandered, out onto the sidewalk to receive his dose of fatherlove. I followed him, merely to eavesdrop on his joy. The sky was a chalky purple and horns were blaring everywhere.

TIM HAD SHUT
off the radio, in the interest of sparing me the postgame interviews. I would only read about what happened next, how Derek Lowe strutted off the mound and made an obscene gesture toward the A’s. And how, in the A’s locker room, Miguel Tejada raged against Lowe and vowed revenge to the assembled reporters. At a certain point, he was led away from the jackals to a private alcove where he broke down altogether, for this was the ninth straight playoff clincher he had lost, and the weight of futility had finally crushed his athlete’s pride. Tejada wept.

As for me, I was stoned and depressed, mired in a classic sports hangover, the period after a harsh loss during which you revisit all the ways your team chunked it while simultaneously feeling like a fool for revisiting all the ways your team chunked it. Psychologically speaking, the A’s hadn’t lost. They had refused to allow themselves to win. And this struck me as my own crisis, the white-hot shame at the center of my fandom. I kept holding myself back in matters of love and literature, swinging through the fat pitches, forgetting to touch home plate, choking. How is it, I wondered, that I might rid myself of this hex? Was there some sort of operation? Or maybe a blood transfusion. I even called my father, hoping to swear off the A’s out loud, like they teach addicts to do. But he wasn’t around.

I had reached the stretch of the Mass Pike that runs beneath the Monster, and as I passed into the shadow of that great green wall a terrible shame seized me. The Lord God of Sport had led me into exile, led me into battle against my sworn enemies, led me to the brink of victory a dozen times—and each time forsaken me. Or, more accurately, He had allowed me to forsake myself. What if there was no lesson here, merely an exercise in pain?

THOSE HOPING FOR
a recitation of the ensuing Sox/Yankees series can pretty much fuck off. I did everything I could to ignore the affair, by which I mean I caught only five of the seven games. I am trying to think of the most appropriate metaphor for what it was like to watch. The best I can do is to say that it was like having to choose between Bush and Cheney.
¹⁵
The rivals bashed each other around for six games, taking three apiece, to set up the expected showdown: Pedro versus Roger Clemens.

I watched the game in a bar called Rocco’s, on the shores of Lake Erie, the western extremis of New York State. The crowd was split down the middle, the Sox fans loud with pilsner and anguish, while the Yankee partisans remained quiet, churning inwardly. Clemens lacked his fastball, and exited after four. Pedro pitched superbly. He entered the seventh with a three-run lead, at which point Fox flashed a graphic onscreen, noting that he was 84–3 in such situations. The balloon of hope within Red Sox Nation swelled almost painfully.

Everyone assumed Grady Little would yank Pedro before the eighth inning, and allow his bulletproof bullpen to finish the matter. But this he did not do. No, Pedro remained in the game for another five batters, suffering what probably ranks as the most notorious meltdown in the history of baseball.

I should have considered this pleasure enough. But I was (and am), after all, the Red Sox Antichrist, and thus in this, my shining moment, I made what would turn out to be a momentous decision: I wrote a seven-thousand-word letter to my friends in which I broke down Grady’s refusal to pull Pedro, and the ensuing disaster, in excruciating (and psychologically tawdry) detail. It was a florid glop of prose, bristling with the sort of false empathy that Iagos like me conjure at the drop of a ballcap. I knew my friends would read every word and that they would suffer deeply in doing so, while I, an alleged friend, an alleged
sympathizer,
derived some demonstrably sick pleasure at the thought of their deep suffering.

SO MY FRIENDS
were in a shambles. The callers to WEEI had descended into sociopathic ideation. It was, in this sense, a return to the known world of glorious victimhood—for Sox fans are never happier than when they are pursuing despair.

As the 2004 season opened, my own expectations were humble: I wanted a final confrontation between the A’s and Red Sox, with a culminating contest at Fenway Park, during which my Oak-town heroes would decimate the Old Towne Team, and, if necessary, I would be torn limb from limb on the infield grass by a raging mob. The key to happiness resides in such compromises.

But the A’s missed the playoffs by one game. And the Sox, after losing three straight against the Yanks in the AL Championship, came roaring back to take four straight, then four more against the lethargic Cards. Damon the Apostate smashed the winning run in the Series finale and their new closer, Keith Foulke, recorded the final out, while I cowered beneath my blanket, waiting for my birthday to be over.

THE SOX FANS
among you will find this summary cruel in its brevity. The rest of you need not shed too many tears. For the Red Sox, upon finally winning the Series, have launched their own cottage industry of Soxporn, a torrent of books and videos documenting the fortnight in question. My friends have watched and read and rewatched and reread all of this crap. They have wrung from the experience every precious drop of vindication, and turned ahead to disappointments yet unborn.

I think now of the recent conversation I had with a cabbie named John, on the way to the airport. The radio was tuned to WEEI, so I had to shout to be heard.

“You a Sox fan?”

“Since Yaz was in short pants,” he said.

I asked him where he’d been when the team won the Series.

“Didn’t watch the game,” he said. “Didn’t watch any of them.”

“Wait a second,” I said. “Not even the comeback against the Yankees?”

John the Cabbie glanced at me in the rearview mirror and shook his head. “Would’ve jinxed them,” he said calmly. His cheeks were a deep scarlet, his white pompadour stained by a lifetime of smokes and cheap pomade. “Anyway, they won’t win again, not in my lifetime.”

He spoke the line with proper vehemence, but there was something hollow in his delivery. Without the curse, after all, he had lost the exaltation of martyrdom. In winning the Series—a triumph he hadn’t even allowed himself to enjoy—he had suffered the ultimate loss. The secret wish nestled within his stated fear was obvious: He wanted to return to the way it had been before the Sox won, to recapture the ecstatic grievance that had defined him (and his fellow Soxchotics) as special.

It was at this precise moment, as I stared into the bloodshot eyes of John the Cabbie, as together we were swallowed by the blackness of the Callahan Tunnel and the babbling menchildren of WEEI fell abruptly silent, that I hung up my cleats as the Red Sox Antichrist. My work, I guess you could say, was done.

AND WHAT OF
me and my Athletics? I keep meaning to quit them. Really I do. I have personal matters to attend to, and a growing list of moral qualms. I can’t help feeling that sport has become a fueling station on the road to war.

It is also, in my view, a form of slavery. However we might seek to obscure this truth, the modern sports complex has reduced the most abject precincts of this planet to ad hoc plantations, harvested each year for specimens. The strongest and fleetest may win a few years of lucrative idolatry, but they are discarded soon enough, when their bodies break down. The peculiar sickness of the American mindset may be located in the peculiar notion that the professional athlete—rewarded all his life for a capacity to defeat and harm others—should serve as a moral exemplar. (The common parlance is
role model
).

Having said all this, I am left to explain why I can’t quite quit the A’s. My fancy excuse runs something like this: In a world in which our politics, our entertainment, our very waking lives have come to feel preordained by corporate masters, sport offers a last vestige of unscripted experience. True pressure, true grace.

The simple excuse is that I feel alive when I watch the A’s. This vitality often takes the form of misery. But the chance to surrender my will is not without its sacred pleasures—a language, however primitive, with which to seek the solace of other men. Maybe it makes more sense to think of sport as the dominant religion of our age, the discovery of faith within ourselves by an allegiance to gods we can see, all those lovely bodies making miracles of air.
¹⁶

I’m not suggesting that a stadium is a church. A stadium is just a place for people to gather close together, one of the last, ripe with longing, exposed to the risks of hope and its duties. I’m not naïve. Only I am. Sometimes I need to pretend. Sometimes I need a broken-down old stadium, stinking of beer and mustard, and rain falling like flour before the sodium lights.

HOW REALITY TV ATE MY LIFE

AKA INVASION OF THE RED BULL CONQUISTADORS
(A Melodramatic Farce in Twelve Brief Acts)

Act One

In Which I Make the Acquaintance of P. Diddy’s Personal Trainer

 

A
couple of summers ago, a woman named Angela Bosworth sent me an e-mail asking if I would like to appear on a new “documentary style” VH1 show called
Totally Obsessed.
I’d just written a book called
Candyfreak,
which was about, among other things, my obsession with candy. Ms. Bosworth had not actually read the book. She had, rather, “read a ton of articles” about the book.

This did not entirely surprise me. I had done a good bit of TV for
Candyfreak
already, so I was used to people not reading my book. I knew that TV producers came on hot and heavy but rarely followed up. And I knew they had a tendency to exaggerate the length and potential impact of any appearance.

My strangest TV experience to date had been on a show called
Cold Pizza,
ESPN2’s answer to the
Today
show. They asked me to come down to their New York studio to discuss Halloween candy. I was booked onto the same show as P. Diddy’s personal trainer, with whom I spent a good half hour in the green room and who, I don’t mind telling you, has absolutely great delts, as well as a stunning grasp of the metabolic effects of a low-carb diet, though I can’t remember his actual name. Let me be blunt: I’m not sure I ever knew it.

He got about twenty minutes on the air, in which he discussed his employer’s upcoming entry into the New York Marathon, his training regimen, his blisters, and other pressing issues within the greater Diddysphere. My appearance lasted five minutes. I was paired with a host whose on-camera persona called to mind a particularly frightening anxiety attack I’d suffered in college. At one point, he stuck his mic inside his mouth so viewers could hear the Pop Rocks he had just inhaled. I know that at least one person saw this segment, because the guy who manages the bar where I go to drink off such experiences told me his wife had seen me. This is what’s known, in the writing game, as fame.

To be clear, then: I had what I want to call a
bad feeling
about the request from VH1. I was almost certain it would mean a lot of time and effort, and some mild humiliation, that it would only invite stress and disappointment into my already stressed, disappointing life, that, in other words, I should delete the message, pretend it never arrived, and get back to work.

Act Two

The Things We Do for Love

 

Why, then, did I forward this message to my publicist—knowing that this act alone would essentially require me to appear on
Totally Obsessed
?

I want to say that I had hope. I want to say that I truly believed appearing on this TV show would lead viewers to seek out my work and that some of them would dig what I was up to and would tell their TV-watching pals, so that, in a sense, eventually, there would be a whole army of viewers awakened to the pleasures of literature. I want to say this. But of course it’s complete bullshit.