Boy Toy (6 page)

And then I'm awake again. Still feel like I haven't slept at all. I only know I did because there's a big chunk of
blank
in my memory and the clock has jumped ahead to almost six.

Rachel...

What did she mean by "I'll take you up on that"? I told her underhand wasn't the same as overhand. You don't "take someone up" on that; you either agree or disagree with them.

And underhand
isn't
the same as overhand. It just isn't. I've seen Rachel pitch a couple of times when I ended up at softball games, and the style is completely different. We first met when we were kids, playing rec center baseball and Little League together. She had a decent fastball back then, but her slider was an absolute killer. I rarely hit off her, but she had control issues—she walked me a lot. My on-base percentage was sort of ridiculous, but I was pretty small until a big growth spurt hit me in middle school; my strike zone was tough to nail, so I got walked a lot. I had to teach myself to swing at a lot of bad pitches if I ever wanted to hit the ball, and then I had to un-teach myself the same thing.

Once we got older ... Well, we would have gone into separate sports anyway. Brookdale is just barely progressive enough to let boys and girls play baseball together through sixth grade. But after that, it's "separate but equal." Even if the nightmare at Rachel's house hadn't happened five years ago, we still would have been seeing less of each other.

By now I'm too keyed up to go back to sleep. My alarm will be going off in half an hour anyway. I do some crunches, some pushups, some curls and flies with the resistance bands I keep under the bed. Exercise is good—it's tough to think
too
much when you're exercising. You get all caught up in the repetition and the counting and focusing on your form, and there's no room for flickers or memories or recriminations.

My stomach rumbles, but I hear Mom and Dad bustling around in the kitchen, getting their lunches ready and drinking coffee. I feel awkward seeing them in the morning after I've heard them through the vent. As if they'll be able to tell that I could hear. Or that there will be some weird sign of failed sex on them—like the scarlet letter, almost—that I'll have to pretend not to see.

I wait until I can't wait any longer; I don't want to be late picking up Zik and condemn him to the indignity of taking the bus. Even though I haven't heard Dad leave yet, I head out to the kitchen.

He's sitting at the table, stirring the contents of a big metallic coffee mug.

"You're up early for someone who doesn't have to go to school," he says.

"I'm taking Zik to school."
Like yesterday,
I want to add, but don't. Dad's not known for the quantity of clues in his possession.

"That's nice of you." He frowns and peers into his mug. His eyes go to the creamer, and I can almost see the conflict within him.

"Look," he goes on, reaching for the creamer, "your mother is going to be out late tonight. Some baby shower or wedding shower or..." He regards the creamer in his hands, then tips it enough to let a few drops into his coffee. This seems to make him happy. "Some damn shower or other. Anyway, I was thinking we'd just do pizza for dinner. Does that work for you?"

"Sure, Dad. Whatever you want. Can Zik come over?"

"Sure, sure. How is Zik these days?"

I love how he says "these days," as if he hasn't seen Zik in years, as if Zik is some stranger from a remote land who shows up on the summer solstice and that's it.

"He's doing OK. Pissed at me for getting suspended. He says I'm gonna lose my swing without practice."

Dad grunts. "You won't lose your swing in three days. That's stupid."

My dad is not one for idle chitchat.

Dad leaves for work and I slug down a granola bar and milk before heading out to the car.

When Zik climbs in next to me a few minutes later, he has a weird look on his face. Almost as if he's trying not to smile.

"You OK?" I ask him.

"Oh, yeah. Sure." He gives me the once-over. "How about you? You OK?"

Is this about the newspaper article again? "Yeah, man, I'm fine."

Zik nods as if he doesn't believe me. There's an anticipatory silence in the car as I pull away from Zik's house, as if we're each waiting for the other to say something. After a few moments, Zik breaks the silence.

"Here, J." He pulls a spiral-bound notebook out of his backpack and holds it up to me.

"What's that?"

"Eyes on the road!"

I tap the brake and come nowhere near to rear-ending a Honda. Nowhere near. Seriously.

"Well, don't fucking wave shit in my face while I'm driving!"

He tosses the notebook into the back seat. "I copied all my notes from bio, history, and English last night. For the last two days, you know? Sorry I couldn't go to your math class for you. Or physics." He pauses. "Or Spanish."

Zik and I share most of our classes, but there are a couple of the really high-level math and science classes that I'm in alone. But in the meantime, he's saved me from having to hunt down all of this stuff from my teachers in most of my classes.

"You saved my life, man. Or my GPA, at least."

He grins. "Gotta keep the Streak alive, Iron Man."

Years ago, a ballplayer named Cal Ripken Jr. became known as the Iron Man because he had this ungodly streak of consecutive played games: 2,632 by the time he was finished. People who like baseball like to talk about home run records and hitting records and pitching records—they bring up Bonds and McGwire and Clemens and Wood; all that. But people who
love
baseball know that Ripken's record is
the
record, the record that will go unbroken as long as we live. Why? It's simple: Anyone can have a good season and hit enough homers to kick Barry Bonds out of the record books. Anyone can have a lucky game and get twenty-one strikeouts in nine innings, thereby eclipsing Clemens, Wood, and Johnson at once. But Ripken's record spans
seventeen seasons.
It's not a case where you can have a good game or a good season or juice yourself up on steroids and break a record. You can't break Ripken's record with luck or a burst of skill. You have to be dedicated. You have to have a superhuman focus that pushes you through injuries, bad days, and all the petty stupidities the world throws at you ... all the while maintaining a level of ability that suits the major leagues.

Zik calls me Iron Man because I haven't had less than an A in any class since third grade.

It's nothing I set out to do. I wasn't trying, at least, not at first. But somewhere around sixth grade, Zik noticed; that's when he started calling me Iron Man. It was just an in-joke between friends, so it didn't mean much. And I figured that once I hit high school I would, inevitably, get a B at some point.

But it didn't happen. Or, at least, it hasn't happened yet, and given that it's April of my senior year, the odds are on my side. The longer I went on my personal streak, though, the more intense it became. For most of my life, I got straight A's as a matter of course. I never even thought about it. Schoolwork just came easily to me, and it was no problem to hit my scores. But once I became aware of my own success, it started to gnaw at me. I started to obsess over it. Every paper, every test, had to be an A. I couldn't get a B on something and then pull it up with a bunch of A's later—no, I had to get all A's, all the time, or else I'd start to panic. One slip could lead to more, after all.

I wonder if that's how it was for Ripken? At first was it just fun playing the game? And some breed of stubbornness or persistence or overblown work ethic that compelled him to play through injuries? And when did he first realize that he might be able to challenge Lou Gehrig's old record of 2,130 games? That record stood for fifty-six years before Ripken broke it—it was so inviolable that it was practically a law of physics. And then Cal Ripken, the Iron Man, did the baseball equivalent of discovering cold fusion.

So sometimes I wonder—when was that moment that it occurred to him that not only
could
he break Gehrig's record ... but he
had
to? In press interviews, Ripken always said that the streak and the record were secondary to the game, and I've always said that the learning and the process of learning are superior to the actual grades...

But honestly, the one thing Cal Ripken and I have in common is this: We're both full of shit. Because streaks and records have a way of worming into your mind whether you want them there or not.

I've got six weeks left of school. I could bag my classes and end up with a B average in most of them and still go to college. And that would be a lot less pressure on myself. But I can't do that. My parents don't understand that. Hell, even some of my teachers have told me to take a break.

But Zik gets it. Zik gets it, and he sat up last night copying his notes into a second notebook. Because Zik wants to see the Streak continue.

And unlike most people, Zik knows that I earned each and every one of those grades. Even the ones in seventh grade, when Eve was my history teacher. Even those.

Here's the thing about baseball—at the end of the day, it's not really a team sport.

Which is just as well, because I'm not one for teams. Teams generally are a collection of loosely aligned assholes who all think they have something in common when they really don't. Jocks are jerks, plain and simple. I've seen it my whole life. Just because I have a talent with a bat, I've been witness to some real primo acts of assholery—front-row center seat, let me tell you. Freshman year, I saw a new kid just about dunked headfirst into a flushing toilet for the ever-popular swirly.

I say "just about" because I intervened. I was only a freshman, but even then I was somewhat legendary to the upperclassmen. I was the only freshman that year to start on the varsity team, and in the early practices I had batted well against the senior pitchers, going 6 for 7 with a double and a triple for a whopping .857 batting average and an unheard of 1.286 slugging average. Now, granted, that was just in practice, but I was a freshman hitting against seniors. It got people's attention. Early on, Coach Kaltenbach set me aside for "special attention."

I took a few licks rescuing that hapless new kid, but it was worth it. Given my history and my skills on the field, I get treated with a certain deference at South Brook, a deference bordering on fear, but I'll take what I can get.

Coach's "special attention" turned out to be nothing more and nothing less than a series of concerted efforts to screw up everything I was doing right and replace it with his own half-assed ideas of how to play the game. It was
enormously
frustrating. He messed up my swing something fierce, and he couldn't understand why I suddenly started hitting only around .300 by the time the season started.

Finally I had to tell him to shove it and I went back to doing things my own way. In our first game of the season, I kicked serious ass, hitting the ball every time at bat for a perfect 1.000 batting average. I drove in two runs with a double and a triple, then hit a home run in the bottom of the seventh, racking up a godlike 3.000 slugging average, all of it by ignoring everything he'd tried to teach me. If there's a better, more effective way of telling someone to fuck off, I have yet to discover it.

It was in that first season that I also managed to get Coach to agree to make me permanent DH. I can't stand playing in the field. I'm a good defensive player, but to me it just ties you into that whole "team" thing and makes you lose focus on what's important: the hitting. Coach didn't know how to deal with me—he was used to dealing with jocks, and I'm not a jock. I guess if you wanted to call me something, you could call me a scholar-athlete, though I hate that term too. It's like a bizarre species of human that only exists, at most, for eight years—high school and college—before vanishing, collapsing like light into one or the other, particle or wave.

Other than having Coach on my ass for four years, constantly trying to get me to change something about my stance or trying to get me to play in the field for a game or two ("Just to see how you do," he says), baseball's been one of my few pleasures in high school. Because I don't let myself fall into that team trap. I don't let myself think of it as a team effort. It's not.

In football or basketball or any of those "bunch of guys try to get a widget to the other end of the field" games, you
have
to be a team. You have to think like a team and subordinate yourself to the team ethic and structure. It's the only way to accomplish anything.

But in baseball...

In baseball, when you get into the batter's box, that's
it.
It's just you. It's one man against the world. All that matters in that moment is your individual achievement and your individual skill. There is literally nothing that anyone else on your team can do for you. Hell, they're all sitting on the bench, waiting to see what happens, just like the fans in the crowd! It's just you and your bat.

And the ball.

It's the best, most sublime, purest and truest moment in all of sport. There is nothing in this world more impressive than a good hitter in baseball. Pitchers get all sorts of attention when they strike you out, but here's a secret: Pitching is
nothing
compared to batting. Striking someone out isn't
nearly
as impressive as getting a hit. Want proof? Tell me how many major leaguers hit the ball more often than not. Don't bother to look it up—I'll tell you. There hasn't been a .400 hitter in more than sixty years, since Ted Williams, much less someone hitting over .500. Hitting the ball is infinitely tougher than pitching it. And as far as getting on base period, Williams was the best
ever
and even he only did it 48.3 percent of the time. As a pitcher, you have the entire field backing you up, which I guess brings me right back to where I started.