tim270
04-29-2012, 04:19 AM
The Old Ball Game
America is big and fast, and in ways we are reluctant to admit to ourselves, spectacularly ugly. To us Americans this is the natural state of things and we take no more notice of it than a man would who has grown a little short-sighted, or a woman who was born with one leg slightly longer than the other, surely we limp but this is of no great matter and we have acclimated ourselves accordingly. But to a little Russian girl who was born in a decaying empire and raised in a world of English civility and restraint, America seemed a noisy leviathan composed of startling excesses.
There were the cars for one thing. In Europe the cars were small and efficient, hardly more than glorified scooters, but in America the cars were large and angry with devilish engines that growled and belched and propelled their passengers at break-neck speed along the impossibly wide highways. The people were different too; everyone was so mind-numbingly loud. In the England of her adolescence conversations were subdued and dependent upon a certain gentle humor, but in America everyone spoke at once in their loud, brusque accents. It was as if any voice beneath a bellow would immediately be drowned out and submerged in the cacophony of so many tongues.
Still, she couldn’t help but admit, there were pleasant things about America too. The boys all had such wonderful smiles, and everything was so clean and new. She couldn’t help but laugh at how new everything was. Even the things the Americans considered old- the “historic districts” they called them- would have seemed new construction in Europe. Despite the glittering façade of the country, she couldn’t ignore the great ugliness she felt welling up beneath the surface and everything appeared tainted to her, like a lovely rose blossom infested with Japanese beetles.
Her name was Irena Ivanova and she was pretty in that bland Continental way, with pale, frosty skin and dark, wavy hair falling to the middle of her back. Europe has learnt a certain deference to American education, so when the opportunity had arisen, she left her mother in England where they had settled after the U.S.S.R. had disintegrated, and moved to Frederick, Maryland, to begin attending classes at Hood University, an all-female institution. She was extraordinarily intelligent and ambitious; she was enrolled on scholarship in a double major, Economics and Physics, and she was the top student in both departments. She spoke four languages flawlessly, smatterings of two others, and had read all the great European authors of the last five hundred years. Her intelligence, as is apt to happen when one is young and life has not beaten into you the futility and worthlessness of even intelligence, had lent her a certain arrogance, and she couldn’t help but hold herself above the Americans all around her and America in general.
She had arrived in Frederick in August, bared witness to the flaming, dying fall in that mountainous region of Maryland, turned her own icy blue eyes upon the gray and damp, and to her, intolerably mild winter, and seen the sweet, happy sprout of April- and none of it had moved her. She was in America, but she wasn’t. She was cocooned within the comforting familiarity of the other European students at Hood, and by her on-again, off-again (mainly at the whims of her own convenience) boyfriend, Francisco DiBenidetto, the son of an Italian diplomat. She spent her weekends with him in D.C. moving among the white marble of the city, speaking in French, and watching films with subtitles.
On this Friday evening in May, however, she was waiting impatiently under the Grimes’ clock tower on the campus of Hood for the arrival of an American boy. She had met him on campus at a party about a month earlier when he and three other American boys had “crashed” what had been a gathering of mostly European girls sitting around their dorm lobby and quietly sipping wine.
They had been under the impression that they were attending a “sorority” party, when in fact that gathering had been advertised as a “Serbian” party. Despite their disappointment they had stayed, and produced canned beer from a book bag, and begun insinuating themselves with the girls.
He was charming in that specifically American way, which meant to her he possessed a certain boyishness and humor. They had talked all night about America and England- he had that curiosity all Americans possess, however disdainfully, of the Old World- and before he left he had asked for her phone number. She had blushed imperceptibly and given it to him; European boys were rarely so direct.
In the last month he had taken to calling her late at night with a few drinks on his tongue (she rarely went out) and they would lie in bed, ten miles apart, and bare their souls to each other in a way that is only possible over the distant and impersonal telephone. He was beginning to fascinate her. She was used to a certain brooding temperament and black humor in European men, and he was so different. He took to the world in a great, naïve fearlessness, and everything seemed to promise him… something. She could never quite understand what it was he based his sense of undying hope in, but she envied him for it. After these talks had continued intermittently for a month she had been half-cajoled, half-persuaded into accepting his invitation for a date. He was taking her to Baltimore- a city she’d never seen- for a baseball game- a sport she’d never understood.
So, waiting under that spire of a clock in the late afternoon sunshine, which seemed to promise the coming of another brutal Maryland summer, she prepared herself for a submersion into the unknown.
II.
“It’s all pretty simple.” James Newcombe was saying to her as they sped down I-70 in his long black Cadillac. He was immensely proud of his car- it had belonged to his grandfather- but to Irena it was old and rusty and intolerably loud. “Basically, the pitcher throws the ball, then the batter hits it and tries to run around the bases until he scores.”
She studied him as he drove and wondered why she felt compelled to come. He certainly was handsome enough, with his blue eyes and shortly cropped auburn hair, but he was also a bit too comical to be taken seriously. He was dressed in a white button-up jersey with the word “Orioles” emblazoned across the chest in a garish orange and black, and it was all she could to suppress a chuckle when she thought of the absurdity of the uniform.
“Where does he hit the ball?” She asked at last.
He was busy observing her just as critically. She was dressed in a black dress- the kind that might be worn at a cocktail party or a nice restaurant- with her legs sticking out of the bottom like two pale geese necks. Well, at least she got the color right, he thought to himself.
“Well,” He thought for a moment, “There’s fair and foul territory and if he hits it fair then the ball’s in play, but if he hits it foul then he gets to do it over again till he strikes out, or hits it fair.”
“Oh.” She was confused.
He laughed at her bewilderment. “It really is very simple, but I guess you’ll have to see it to understand it.”
He had been attempting for the last twenty minutes, as they had whizzed down the three lane highway and past the freshly-sprouting trees on the side of the road, to explain the most elementary rules of the game to her. She had noted his excitement when he talked of the sport and its players, and she had thought it to be cute. That he should be moved by something so childishly simple!
“What’s a home run?” She asked, the words moving doubtfully across her lips.
He answered without taking his eyes of the road in front of him.
“A home run is when the batter hits the ball out of the park. Basically, he hits it so far that the fielders can’t get to it and he gets to run all the way around the bases without anyone getting him out.”
“The park?” She asked.
He laughed. “Don’t worry. You’ll understand it when you see it.”
Soon, the interstate began to merge with the Baltimore beltway and they found themselves in bumper-to-bumper traffic, watching the heat exhaust rise from the cars all around them.
“It’s the first exit off the beltway.” He said, “So we shouldn’t be in all this too long.”
He passed the delay talking about games he’d seen in the past, and old players, and the grand tradition of the Baltimore Orioles. After fifteen minutes, in which they’d managed to move three quarters of a mile, he maneuvered his long black car onto an exit ramp which read Franklin Avenue, and they began driving eastward through the outskirts of the city and toward the Inner Harbor.
It was her first time in Baltimore and she looked around intently. It was as if the city had been formed by one of those underwater volcanic mountains that give birth to islands. In the distance, obviously right upon the bay, rose high, towering skyscrapers; the rest of the city, including West Baltimore where they were, was low-flung as if it had been formed by the falling debris of whatever great trauma formed those distant high-rises.
They passed block after block of dilapidated row houses, all with sunken, rotting porches, upon which black shadows moved languidly in the gathering dusk. A cemetery was to her right and it seemed to follow the snaking road and stretch for innumerable acres.
“What cemetery is that?” She asked. “It’s so big.”
“I’m not sure the name of it.” He said. “But I’m pretty sure Poe’s buried there.”
“Pardon?”
He resisted the urge to correct her English “Pardon?” with the American “Excuse me?” “Edgar Allen Poe- the poet.”
“Isn’t that interesting?” She said happily. “I’d like to see his grave.”
He laughed. “No, you wouldn’t. Right on the other side of that cemetery’s MLK.”
“MLK?”
“Martin Luther King.” He explained. “A little tip for you- whenever you’re in a big American city and there’s an exit for a street named after MLK, don’t take it.”
“Why?” She asked.
“Because it’s always the black part of town and it’s not where you want to be.” He said with a finality that seemingly resolved the issue.
They continued along Franklin Avenue, leaving the dark menace she didn’t understand behind them, until they found themselves moving through the jostling traffic in the shadows cast by the towering buildings of the Inner Harbor. James maneuvered his car through the crush of metal and chrome and rubber, until they came to a parking deck five blocks from the stadium. He paid the man in the booth twenty dollars for the privilege of parking his car there for three hours, and then they rode up four levels in the dim light until he spotted an empty space. He parked and they got out of the car and she could hear the shouts of little children echoing in the cavernous deck.
“There’s a lot more people coming this year.” He said.
“Everybody thinks we have a chance to win.”
“Do we?” She asked hopefully.
“That’s the beauty of May.” He said, as he wrapped his arm around her and they began walking towards the elevator.
“Nobody’s lost yet.”
The elevator was so packed with people it was necessary to maintain a stiff rigidity, lest the buttons on the person’s shirt behind you leave an impress in your flesh. A little boy, no more than five and holding onto his mother’s hand, said, “There’s too much people!” And everyone smiled and looked down at him tenderly.
Outside, in the fading twilight which streaked the sky orange and red above the vertigo-inducing buildings, they found themselves in a rivulet of bodies all trickling down Eutaw Street and towards the stadium. The stadium appeared in the distance as a giant bowl with huge stands of lights rigged to the top, and as it was slightly lower than the street she could see the endless rows of hatted-heads funneling into it. It was like a huge, outdoor theatre.
The street for two blocks leading to the stadium was lined with little stands, in which people sat and called to the passing crowd in a desperate attempt to sell them something: hats, sodas, pennants…. A homeless man, matted and unshaven, and clothed in filthy camouflage, walked past her and leaned near and muttered,
“Tickets? Tickets?” from the side of his mouth. She moved instinctively closer to James and put her arm in his.
“Hold on a sec.” James said as they passed one of the stands.
He left her on the sidewalk and went up and purchased a bag of peanuts.
When he was back, he opened the bag and cracked one and tossed the insides into his mouth and the shell onto the street.
“They’re cheaper out here. Do you want some?”
She declined. They continued walking along the street until they came upon the stadium and a colossal brick building, the length of a few city blocks. James approached the building, with its ticket windows facing the street, and said, “We’ve got to pick up the tickets at will call.”
They waited in line for twenty minutes and spoke little. James continued to chomp on his peanuts and toss the shells on the ground, and she looked around and took note of the buzz and electricity of the crowd around her. It was a riot of color and pageantry. Everyone seemed so excited and she was suddenly filled with anticipation to see what this game was all about, and why it meant so much to these people.
Finally they came to the front of the line, and a little man in a visor slid them out their tickets, and they took them and walked around the corner of the building to the main gates, where an usher in an orange vest took their tickets, ripped them in half and handed them back the stubs, and stepped aside for the to enter through the well-worn turnstiles.
III.
Beneath the stadium was like a catacomb. It was very dim and large and full of echoing voices.
“I have to use the lavatory.” She said to James.
He directed her to it and she stepped through the large red doors. She had to wait a few minutes under the florescent lights for a stall to be free, and when she finally entered it she stretched out tissue paper over the toilet seat before she sat upon it- the idea of going to the bathroom here was somehow so revolting! After thoroughly washing her hands she stepped back into the dim bowels of the stadium and saw James waiting for her, holding a Styrofoam cup holder with four draft beers in it.
She looked at the drinks, and then him, skeptically.
“This way,” He explained, “We don’t have to get up every twenty minutes and miss the game. You ready?”
She nodded her head.
“Good.” He said. “Our seats are right over here.”
They walked through the buzzing crowd for a hundred feet until they came to a tunnel with a blinding light at the end of it. They walked up the incline and stepped out into the last of the sun; she had to adjust her eyes to the light before she saw the playing field beneath, and the multi-colored crowd rolling all around her. The field startled her; the vibrancy of the colors was amazing: the greenness of the grass, the rich auburn dirt, the phosphorescent whiteness of the chalk lines and the uniforms.
The grass was cut into a checkerboard pattern and it was all so very breath-taking. It was as if the whole city- the dilapidated row houses, the cemetery, the shady characters who solicited them as they walked into the stadium, that filthy bathroom she had just been in- had been a labyrinth leading to this little patch of pastoral green.
They walked down a flight of steps before they turned into an aisle and delicately picked their way over people’s legs and feet to their seats in the left field section. They had just been seated when a voice came over the loudspeaker and said:
“Now batting, the third baseman, Mel-vin Mor-aah!”
The crowd rose up and cheered; a whistle rent the air; voices reverberated around her- “C’mon Melvin!”; “Hey batter, batter, batter!”
“We’re a little late.” James said. “It’s already the bottom of the first.” He handed her a beer from the tray he kept between his feet, and seeing her confusion, explained, “The game’s played in nine innings and each has a top and a bottom. This is the bottom of the first.”
She didn’t understand. And so the game continued in puzzling pauses and frenetic bursts personified by the hustling players who trailed little clouds of dust in their wakes as they rushed around the bases. At first, she found it unintelligible and therefore distasteful, just as she had found almost all of America to be. But then, under the stimulus of a few beers and the persuasive tone of James as he went on and on didactically about the finer points of the game, she began to understand and enjoy herself to an extent- if only in a benevolent way.
In the bottom of the sixth inning after they had consumed two trays full of beer- James drinking three to her one- and four hotdogs wrapped in tinfoil, a player came to bat from the visiting New York team and the crowd began to snarl and boo.
James stood up and shouted, “Jeter, you suck!” And sat back down next to her.
She looked at him curiously. “Who is Jeter?” She asked.
“The player who just came to bat.” He answered.
“Why does he suck?” She said the word unsurely.
“Because he doesn’t play for Baltimore.” He said laughing. “Why don’t you try it? Stand up and shout, ‘Jeter sucks’!”
“Oh, no. I couldn’t.” She said.
“C’mon.” He cajoled her. “You can’t come to a ballgame and not shout at the other team. Go ahead. Try it.”
She stood up, lest he should think her meek, and in a high-pitched, wavering voice shouted, “Jeter sucks!”
James laughed uncontrollably at her as she sat back down. She was embarrassed. “That was pretty sad.” He said at last.
“What was wrong with that?” She asked, laughing along with him due the sheer amusement he seemed to derive from her.
“You sounded like somebody’s little old grandmother.” He said.
“You gotta put some bass in it. You gotta really mean it.”
She stood up and shouted again, this time with more force. “How was that?” She asked.
“Better. Much better.” He said, nodding his head sagely. “Now try this one….”
So she merged with the crowd and the game, and began to truly enjoy herself as the warm American night came down.
IV.
In the bottom of the ninth it looked very grim indeed for the Baltimore Orioles, and by extension, James. The Orioles were trailing four-to-two and the Yankees had brought in their closer, Mariano Rivera. James consoled himself with beer and long tirades addressed to the spectators around him concerning the moral corruption of the God-damned Yankees and God-damned George Steinbrenner. Irena could feel the ebb in both the crowd and James, but since she cared nothing for the outcome, she was still enlivened by the beer she had drank and the beauty of the park at night. The lights blazed far above the field with the brightness of a hundred suns and drew great, fluttering swarms of moths and mosquitoes.
Suddenly, with the crack of a bat and great flying clods of dirt, the leadoff batter was standing safely on second, and the crowd was reborn.
“Here we go, baby!” James said, as he and the others rose out of their seats and began to cheer. Irena arose with the rest.
When the second batter singled and brought the man on second home, the crowd exploded into utter pandemonium. There were great sustained cheers:
“Here we go O’s! Here we go! (Clap, Clap)
“Here we go O’s! Here we go! (Clap, Clap)
She didn’t think the crowd could grow any louder. However, when the next batter, after taking a pitch, launched the ball off the large, electric scoreboard in right field, it most certainly did. It rose to a vibrating, desperate pitch. James was clapping and hollering and high-fiving everyone around him, and Irena joined meekly in.
The game was now tied. The crowd was elated, ecstatic, and utterly sure they were riding the tide of victory. But the next batter struck out and the winning run remained on second. The crowd was rebuked for a moment but when the next batter stepped to the plate they recovered to clap their hands, bang their feet, and scream from the very bottom of their souls.
They were not disappointed. The batter hit a slow ground ball- James would later say it must’ve had “eyes” on it- that trickled through the infield and sent the runner flying home. The fielder charged and picked up the ball and sent it whizzing into the catcher. The ball and runner arrived simultaneously, and the collision was devastatingly fantastic. The ball careened harmlessly away and the Orioles had won. All along the Inner Harbor there was a happy wailing of joy. James hugged her, and she felt flush and warm in the womb of such excitement.
V.
After the game, they were reluctant to leave the victorious scene so soon so they stayed in their seats awhile, chatting pleasantly and finishing the last of the beer. Very few of the others left and James wondered aloud why they all remained. Then, as if on cue, a voice suddenly announced over the loudspeakers, “The Baltimore Orioles would like to invite everyone to remain in their seats and enjoy the fireworks show being given for fan appreciation night. We would like to thank everyone for coming, and please enjoy the show.”
“Huh?” James said. “I didn’t know about that. Do you wanna stay?”
“Sure.” She smiled. “I’ve never seen a fireworks show before.”
“Okay, but let’s go to the upper deck for a better view.”
They left their seats and came again to the cavernous underbelly of the stadium, where they rode an escalator to the top level. The upper deck was not walled in so she was provided with a wonderful view of the purple horizon and west Baltimore lying dark beneath them as they stepped off the escalator and entered the seating area through another tunnel. The upper deck was mostly deserted and they found seats on the very top row, so that again Baltimore was visible beneath her in the purple night.
They turned towards each other in their seats. “How did you like the game?” He asked.
“It was so…” She searched for the right word. “…Fun.”
“So you had a good time?”
“Yes, James.” She laughed. “I must admit I’m a little surprised.”
He laughed along with her and widened his eyes in mock incredulity. “Well, I’m glad I could surprise you- I guess.”
Then, without premeditation on either side, they exchanged a look and their heads tilted at an angle and began to move together. These things happen like that, suddenly, and bereft of logic or conscience. And so it was for them when their lips finally merged softly together.
Her eyes were closed when she heard the first firework explode over her head. She pulled her lips back from his and tilted her head back just in time to see the firework scattering into green debris. Another one rose and exploded into a wide blue blossom, until it too deteriorated and began to resemble a disintegrating spider, and then, finally, individual droplets began to fall to the earth like dazzling, electric feathers.
Their eyes and then lips met again. She felt his breath against her ear and neck and she gasped, ‘O God, O God, O God….”
And the words wafted away from her and into the warm Baltimore night, across the field of green and into the decaying city and out again, tumbling across the darkened belly of the great beast.
America is big and fast, and in ways we are reluctant to admit to ourselves, spectacularly ugly. To us Americans this is the natural state of things and we take no more notice of it than a man would who has grown a little short-sighted, or a woman who was born with one leg slightly longer than the other, surely we limp but this is of no great matter and we have acclimated ourselves accordingly. But to a little Russian girl who was born in a decaying empire and raised in a world of English civility and restraint, America seemed a noisy leviathan composed of startling excesses.
There were the cars for one thing. In Europe the cars were small and efficient, hardly more than glorified scooters, but in America the cars were large and angry with devilish engines that growled and belched and propelled their passengers at break-neck speed along the impossibly wide highways. The people were different too; everyone was so mind-numbingly loud. In the England of her adolescence conversations were subdued and dependent upon a certain gentle humor, but in America everyone spoke at once in their loud, brusque accents. It was as if any voice beneath a bellow would immediately be drowned out and submerged in the cacophony of so many tongues.
Still, she couldn’t help but admit, there were pleasant things about America too. The boys all had such wonderful smiles, and everything was so clean and new. She couldn’t help but laugh at how new everything was. Even the things the Americans considered old- the “historic districts” they called them- would have seemed new construction in Europe. Despite the glittering façade of the country, she couldn’t ignore the great ugliness she felt welling up beneath the surface and everything appeared tainted to her, like a lovely rose blossom infested with Japanese beetles.
Her name was Irena Ivanova and she was pretty in that bland Continental way, with pale, frosty skin and dark, wavy hair falling to the middle of her back. Europe has learnt a certain deference to American education, so when the opportunity had arisen, she left her mother in England where they had settled after the U.S.S.R. had disintegrated, and moved to Frederick, Maryland, to begin attending classes at Hood University, an all-female institution. She was extraordinarily intelligent and ambitious; she was enrolled on scholarship in a double major, Economics and Physics, and she was the top student in both departments. She spoke four languages flawlessly, smatterings of two others, and had read all the great European authors of the last five hundred years. Her intelligence, as is apt to happen when one is young and life has not beaten into you the futility and worthlessness of even intelligence, had lent her a certain arrogance, and she couldn’t help but hold herself above the Americans all around her and America in general.
She had arrived in Frederick in August, bared witness to the flaming, dying fall in that mountainous region of Maryland, turned her own icy blue eyes upon the gray and damp, and to her, intolerably mild winter, and seen the sweet, happy sprout of April- and none of it had moved her. She was in America, but she wasn’t. She was cocooned within the comforting familiarity of the other European students at Hood, and by her on-again, off-again (mainly at the whims of her own convenience) boyfriend, Francisco DiBenidetto, the son of an Italian diplomat. She spent her weekends with him in D.C. moving among the white marble of the city, speaking in French, and watching films with subtitles.
On this Friday evening in May, however, she was waiting impatiently under the Grimes’ clock tower on the campus of Hood for the arrival of an American boy. She had met him on campus at a party about a month earlier when he and three other American boys had “crashed” what had been a gathering of mostly European girls sitting around their dorm lobby and quietly sipping wine.
They had been under the impression that they were attending a “sorority” party, when in fact that gathering had been advertised as a “Serbian” party. Despite their disappointment they had stayed, and produced canned beer from a book bag, and begun insinuating themselves with the girls.
He was charming in that specifically American way, which meant to her he possessed a certain boyishness and humor. They had talked all night about America and England- he had that curiosity all Americans possess, however disdainfully, of the Old World- and before he left he had asked for her phone number. She had blushed imperceptibly and given it to him; European boys were rarely so direct.
In the last month he had taken to calling her late at night with a few drinks on his tongue (she rarely went out) and they would lie in bed, ten miles apart, and bare their souls to each other in a way that is only possible over the distant and impersonal telephone. He was beginning to fascinate her. She was used to a certain brooding temperament and black humor in European men, and he was so different. He took to the world in a great, naïve fearlessness, and everything seemed to promise him… something. She could never quite understand what it was he based his sense of undying hope in, but she envied him for it. After these talks had continued intermittently for a month she had been half-cajoled, half-persuaded into accepting his invitation for a date. He was taking her to Baltimore- a city she’d never seen- for a baseball game- a sport she’d never understood.
So, waiting under that spire of a clock in the late afternoon sunshine, which seemed to promise the coming of another brutal Maryland summer, she prepared herself for a submersion into the unknown.
II.
“It’s all pretty simple.” James Newcombe was saying to her as they sped down I-70 in his long black Cadillac. He was immensely proud of his car- it had belonged to his grandfather- but to Irena it was old and rusty and intolerably loud. “Basically, the pitcher throws the ball, then the batter hits it and tries to run around the bases until he scores.”
She studied him as he drove and wondered why she felt compelled to come. He certainly was handsome enough, with his blue eyes and shortly cropped auburn hair, but he was also a bit too comical to be taken seriously. He was dressed in a white button-up jersey with the word “Orioles” emblazoned across the chest in a garish orange and black, and it was all she could to suppress a chuckle when she thought of the absurdity of the uniform.
“Where does he hit the ball?” She asked at last.
He was busy observing her just as critically. She was dressed in a black dress- the kind that might be worn at a cocktail party or a nice restaurant- with her legs sticking out of the bottom like two pale geese necks. Well, at least she got the color right, he thought to himself.
“Well,” He thought for a moment, “There’s fair and foul territory and if he hits it fair then the ball’s in play, but if he hits it foul then he gets to do it over again till he strikes out, or hits it fair.”
“Oh.” She was confused.
He laughed at her bewilderment. “It really is very simple, but I guess you’ll have to see it to understand it.”
He had been attempting for the last twenty minutes, as they had whizzed down the three lane highway and past the freshly-sprouting trees on the side of the road, to explain the most elementary rules of the game to her. She had noted his excitement when he talked of the sport and its players, and she had thought it to be cute. That he should be moved by something so childishly simple!
“What’s a home run?” She asked, the words moving doubtfully across her lips.
He answered without taking his eyes of the road in front of him.
“A home run is when the batter hits the ball out of the park. Basically, he hits it so far that the fielders can’t get to it and he gets to run all the way around the bases without anyone getting him out.”
“The park?” She asked.
He laughed. “Don’t worry. You’ll understand it when you see it.”
Soon, the interstate began to merge with the Baltimore beltway and they found themselves in bumper-to-bumper traffic, watching the heat exhaust rise from the cars all around them.
“It’s the first exit off the beltway.” He said, “So we shouldn’t be in all this too long.”
He passed the delay talking about games he’d seen in the past, and old players, and the grand tradition of the Baltimore Orioles. After fifteen minutes, in which they’d managed to move three quarters of a mile, he maneuvered his long black car onto an exit ramp which read Franklin Avenue, and they began driving eastward through the outskirts of the city and toward the Inner Harbor.
It was her first time in Baltimore and she looked around intently. It was as if the city had been formed by one of those underwater volcanic mountains that give birth to islands. In the distance, obviously right upon the bay, rose high, towering skyscrapers; the rest of the city, including West Baltimore where they were, was low-flung as if it had been formed by the falling debris of whatever great trauma formed those distant high-rises.
They passed block after block of dilapidated row houses, all with sunken, rotting porches, upon which black shadows moved languidly in the gathering dusk. A cemetery was to her right and it seemed to follow the snaking road and stretch for innumerable acres.
“What cemetery is that?” She asked. “It’s so big.”
“I’m not sure the name of it.” He said. “But I’m pretty sure Poe’s buried there.”
“Pardon?”
He resisted the urge to correct her English “Pardon?” with the American “Excuse me?” “Edgar Allen Poe- the poet.”
“Isn’t that interesting?” She said happily. “I’d like to see his grave.”
He laughed. “No, you wouldn’t. Right on the other side of that cemetery’s MLK.”
“MLK?”
“Martin Luther King.” He explained. “A little tip for you- whenever you’re in a big American city and there’s an exit for a street named after MLK, don’t take it.”
“Why?” She asked.
“Because it’s always the black part of town and it’s not where you want to be.” He said with a finality that seemingly resolved the issue.
They continued along Franklin Avenue, leaving the dark menace she didn’t understand behind them, until they found themselves moving through the jostling traffic in the shadows cast by the towering buildings of the Inner Harbor. James maneuvered his car through the crush of metal and chrome and rubber, until they came to a parking deck five blocks from the stadium. He paid the man in the booth twenty dollars for the privilege of parking his car there for three hours, and then they rode up four levels in the dim light until he spotted an empty space. He parked and they got out of the car and she could hear the shouts of little children echoing in the cavernous deck.
“There’s a lot more people coming this year.” He said.
“Everybody thinks we have a chance to win.”
“Do we?” She asked hopefully.
“That’s the beauty of May.” He said, as he wrapped his arm around her and they began walking towards the elevator.
“Nobody’s lost yet.”
The elevator was so packed with people it was necessary to maintain a stiff rigidity, lest the buttons on the person’s shirt behind you leave an impress in your flesh. A little boy, no more than five and holding onto his mother’s hand, said, “There’s too much people!” And everyone smiled and looked down at him tenderly.
Outside, in the fading twilight which streaked the sky orange and red above the vertigo-inducing buildings, they found themselves in a rivulet of bodies all trickling down Eutaw Street and towards the stadium. The stadium appeared in the distance as a giant bowl with huge stands of lights rigged to the top, and as it was slightly lower than the street she could see the endless rows of hatted-heads funneling into it. It was like a huge, outdoor theatre.
The street for two blocks leading to the stadium was lined with little stands, in which people sat and called to the passing crowd in a desperate attempt to sell them something: hats, sodas, pennants…. A homeless man, matted and unshaven, and clothed in filthy camouflage, walked past her and leaned near and muttered,
“Tickets? Tickets?” from the side of his mouth. She moved instinctively closer to James and put her arm in his.
“Hold on a sec.” James said as they passed one of the stands.
He left her on the sidewalk and went up and purchased a bag of peanuts.
When he was back, he opened the bag and cracked one and tossed the insides into his mouth and the shell onto the street.
“They’re cheaper out here. Do you want some?”
She declined. They continued walking along the street until they came upon the stadium and a colossal brick building, the length of a few city blocks. James approached the building, with its ticket windows facing the street, and said, “We’ve got to pick up the tickets at will call.”
They waited in line for twenty minutes and spoke little. James continued to chomp on his peanuts and toss the shells on the ground, and she looked around and took note of the buzz and electricity of the crowd around her. It was a riot of color and pageantry. Everyone seemed so excited and she was suddenly filled with anticipation to see what this game was all about, and why it meant so much to these people.
Finally they came to the front of the line, and a little man in a visor slid them out their tickets, and they took them and walked around the corner of the building to the main gates, where an usher in an orange vest took their tickets, ripped them in half and handed them back the stubs, and stepped aside for the to enter through the well-worn turnstiles.
III.
Beneath the stadium was like a catacomb. It was very dim and large and full of echoing voices.
“I have to use the lavatory.” She said to James.
He directed her to it and she stepped through the large red doors. She had to wait a few minutes under the florescent lights for a stall to be free, and when she finally entered it she stretched out tissue paper over the toilet seat before she sat upon it- the idea of going to the bathroom here was somehow so revolting! After thoroughly washing her hands she stepped back into the dim bowels of the stadium and saw James waiting for her, holding a Styrofoam cup holder with four draft beers in it.
She looked at the drinks, and then him, skeptically.
“This way,” He explained, “We don’t have to get up every twenty minutes and miss the game. You ready?”
She nodded her head.
“Good.” He said. “Our seats are right over here.”
They walked through the buzzing crowd for a hundred feet until they came to a tunnel with a blinding light at the end of it. They walked up the incline and stepped out into the last of the sun; she had to adjust her eyes to the light before she saw the playing field beneath, and the multi-colored crowd rolling all around her. The field startled her; the vibrancy of the colors was amazing: the greenness of the grass, the rich auburn dirt, the phosphorescent whiteness of the chalk lines and the uniforms.
The grass was cut into a checkerboard pattern and it was all so very breath-taking. It was as if the whole city- the dilapidated row houses, the cemetery, the shady characters who solicited them as they walked into the stadium, that filthy bathroom she had just been in- had been a labyrinth leading to this little patch of pastoral green.
They walked down a flight of steps before they turned into an aisle and delicately picked their way over people’s legs and feet to their seats in the left field section. They had just been seated when a voice came over the loudspeaker and said:
“Now batting, the third baseman, Mel-vin Mor-aah!”
The crowd rose up and cheered; a whistle rent the air; voices reverberated around her- “C’mon Melvin!”; “Hey batter, batter, batter!”
“We’re a little late.” James said. “It’s already the bottom of the first.” He handed her a beer from the tray he kept between his feet, and seeing her confusion, explained, “The game’s played in nine innings and each has a top and a bottom. This is the bottom of the first.”
She didn’t understand. And so the game continued in puzzling pauses and frenetic bursts personified by the hustling players who trailed little clouds of dust in their wakes as they rushed around the bases. At first, she found it unintelligible and therefore distasteful, just as she had found almost all of America to be. But then, under the stimulus of a few beers and the persuasive tone of James as he went on and on didactically about the finer points of the game, she began to understand and enjoy herself to an extent- if only in a benevolent way.
In the bottom of the sixth inning after they had consumed two trays full of beer- James drinking three to her one- and four hotdogs wrapped in tinfoil, a player came to bat from the visiting New York team and the crowd began to snarl and boo.
James stood up and shouted, “Jeter, you suck!” And sat back down next to her.
She looked at him curiously. “Who is Jeter?” She asked.
“The player who just came to bat.” He answered.
“Why does he suck?” She said the word unsurely.
“Because he doesn’t play for Baltimore.” He said laughing. “Why don’t you try it? Stand up and shout, ‘Jeter sucks’!”
“Oh, no. I couldn’t.” She said.
“C’mon.” He cajoled her. “You can’t come to a ballgame and not shout at the other team. Go ahead. Try it.”
She stood up, lest he should think her meek, and in a high-pitched, wavering voice shouted, “Jeter sucks!”
James laughed uncontrollably at her as she sat back down. She was embarrassed. “That was pretty sad.” He said at last.
“What was wrong with that?” She asked, laughing along with him due the sheer amusement he seemed to derive from her.
“You sounded like somebody’s little old grandmother.” He said.
“You gotta put some bass in it. You gotta really mean it.”
She stood up and shouted again, this time with more force. “How was that?” She asked.
“Better. Much better.” He said, nodding his head sagely. “Now try this one….”
So she merged with the crowd and the game, and began to truly enjoy herself as the warm American night came down.
IV.
In the bottom of the ninth it looked very grim indeed for the Baltimore Orioles, and by extension, James. The Orioles were trailing four-to-two and the Yankees had brought in their closer, Mariano Rivera. James consoled himself with beer and long tirades addressed to the spectators around him concerning the moral corruption of the God-damned Yankees and God-damned George Steinbrenner. Irena could feel the ebb in both the crowd and James, but since she cared nothing for the outcome, she was still enlivened by the beer she had drank and the beauty of the park at night. The lights blazed far above the field with the brightness of a hundred suns and drew great, fluttering swarms of moths and mosquitoes.
Suddenly, with the crack of a bat and great flying clods of dirt, the leadoff batter was standing safely on second, and the crowd was reborn.
“Here we go, baby!” James said, as he and the others rose out of their seats and began to cheer. Irena arose with the rest.
When the second batter singled and brought the man on second home, the crowd exploded into utter pandemonium. There were great sustained cheers:
“Here we go O’s! Here we go! (Clap, Clap)
“Here we go O’s! Here we go! (Clap, Clap)
She didn’t think the crowd could grow any louder. However, when the next batter, after taking a pitch, launched the ball off the large, electric scoreboard in right field, it most certainly did. It rose to a vibrating, desperate pitch. James was clapping and hollering and high-fiving everyone around him, and Irena joined meekly in.
The game was now tied. The crowd was elated, ecstatic, and utterly sure they were riding the tide of victory. But the next batter struck out and the winning run remained on second. The crowd was rebuked for a moment but when the next batter stepped to the plate they recovered to clap their hands, bang their feet, and scream from the very bottom of their souls.
They were not disappointed. The batter hit a slow ground ball- James would later say it must’ve had “eyes” on it- that trickled through the infield and sent the runner flying home. The fielder charged and picked up the ball and sent it whizzing into the catcher. The ball and runner arrived simultaneously, and the collision was devastatingly fantastic. The ball careened harmlessly away and the Orioles had won. All along the Inner Harbor there was a happy wailing of joy. James hugged her, and she felt flush and warm in the womb of such excitement.
V.
After the game, they were reluctant to leave the victorious scene so soon so they stayed in their seats awhile, chatting pleasantly and finishing the last of the beer. Very few of the others left and James wondered aloud why they all remained. Then, as if on cue, a voice suddenly announced over the loudspeakers, “The Baltimore Orioles would like to invite everyone to remain in their seats and enjoy the fireworks show being given for fan appreciation night. We would like to thank everyone for coming, and please enjoy the show.”
“Huh?” James said. “I didn’t know about that. Do you wanna stay?”
“Sure.” She smiled. “I’ve never seen a fireworks show before.”
“Okay, but let’s go to the upper deck for a better view.”
They left their seats and came again to the cavernous underbelly of the stadium, where they rode an escalator to the top level. The upper deck was not walled in so she was provided with a wonderful view of the purple horizon and west Baltimore lying dark beneath them as they stepped off the escalator and entered the seating area through another tunnel. The upper deck was mostly deserted and they found seats on the very top row, so that again Baltimore was visible beneath her in the purple night.
They turned towards each other in their seats. “How did you like the game?” He asked.
“It was so…” She searched for the right word. “…Fun.”
“So you had a good time?”
“Yes, James.” She laughed. “I must admit I’m a little surprised.”
He laughed along with her and widened his eyes in mock incredulity. “Well, I’m glad I could surprise you- I guess.”
Then, without premeditation on either side, they exchanged a look and their heads tilted at an angle and began to move together. These things happen like that, suddenly, and bereft of logic or conscience. And so it was for them when their lips finally merged softly together.
Her eyes were closed when she heard the first firework explode over her head. She pulled her lips back from his and tilted her head back just in time to see the firework scattering into green debris. Another one rose and exploded into a wide blue blossom, until it too deteriorated and began to resemble a disintegrating spider, and then, finally, individual droplets began to fall to the earth like dazzling, electric feathers.
Their eyes and then lips met again. She felt his breath against her ear and neck and she gasped, ‘O God, O God, O God….”
And the words wafted away from her and into the warm Baltimore night, across the field of green and into the decaying city and out again, tumbling across the darkened belly of the great beast.