Everything Is Wrong with Me (10 page)

To be clear, my failings in Little League were no fault of my own. I had both the drive and the talent (I swear), but I was cut down before I could bring any of this to the surface. Like many Little Leaguers, my biggest fear was the ball, that little white sphere that was capable of such tremendous damage as a bruise or red mark. This fear doomed me almost immediately. In one of our first practices, we had drills to determine who would play where. In a very un-despot-like fashion, Coach Mike asked each of us where we wanted to play. I was dismayed when I and about six other kids picked third base, but I let it slide because I was obviously far superior to these mongrels. The A’s third baseman would be determined by audition. You had to stand at third, field a grounder hit to you by one of the assistant coaches, and throw it over to first.

I was entirely unprepared for this. There was no warm-up, no explanation, no nothing. This was the first time I’d ever faced live hardball hitting, and it was enough to make me crap my pants (which I’m pretty sure I did at a game at some point during my career). But there was no time to worry here, since Coach Mike, seeing my number 20, called me up to be first in the audition. I crouched in a defensive position, trying to keep my poise. A very short time later—think a second divided by about two million—the grounder sprung off the assistant coach’s bat toward me.

I have heard athletes in interviews talk about how when they’re playing at the top of their game, everything moves very slowly—they achieve a heightened sense of awareness and can see holes in the defensive line or the basket looks as big as an ocean or the fastball looks like it’s coming to the plate in slow motion.

But there was nothing slow about this moment. The grounder came at me like a torpedo—an angry white meteor seemingly shot from a rocket launcher—and took a hard bounce in front of me, before popping me square on the right shin. It happened so quickly that I couldn’t even brace myself for the ball’s impact. Being a pussy, I went down into a crumpled heap, made a sound similar to a piglet falling down a flight of stairs, and hemmed and hawed about how my leg was broken. The coaches helped me off the field to the bench where I could rest up and eat cookies. Welcome to Little League, dickhead.

I’ll can the suspense and tell you that I didn’t pass the audition. Instead of starring at third base, I spent my first season in right field, and when in my second season the designated hitter was instituted, I was my team’s DH. This suited me just fine, as it allowed me more time to sit on the bench and talk about masturbation, but it also meant I was 99 percent sure that I wasn’t going to win any Gold Glove awards. Oh, well.

As for my team life, I couldn’t field, run, hit, or even dress myself properly, but it didn’t matter. Put me in a uniform, give me an audience and all the Mountain Dew I can drink, and I’ll survive and thrive. The good news for me was that the whole team sucked, so we didn’t care much about the glory of the sport. Through all the losses and consolation trips to McDonald’s, I learned that my teammates were a strange group of kids who proved themselves to be endless sources of entertainment. Little League teams are a lot like the Seven Dwarfs, as each kid on the team has a certain unique personality. The sum of these personalities constitutes your average Little League team:

• The Coach’s Son (3B): Why else would a man coach a Little League team unless his son is playing on that team? The Coach’s Son can take any number of personalities mentioned below, but on my team he was just a little slow. Or perhaps I’m just jealous, because of course he wanted—and was awarded—my position, third base. I don’t think I’m bitter anymore though. I’m a writer now, so I get, like, a ton of blow jobs.
  
• The Eight-Year-Old Who’s Really Nineteen (1B): Mancuso. That was his name on my team. You know the type: he’s the best player on the team and has had pubes since before you were born; while the other players are talking about candy he’s complaining about his mortgage; and he has to miss a few games here and there for jury duty. My memory is a little blurry, but I’m fairly certain Mancuso would show up to games on a motorcycle, hit a home run every time he came up to the plate, and then speed away, surely to go smoke cigarettes and have sex with his girlfriend or possibly wife. Meanwhile, I’d go home, eat a pouch of powdered cheese, and throw up. How was it possible that this guy and I were on the same team?
  
• The Eight-Year-Old Who’s Really Four (OF): On the opposite end of the spectrum, I’m sure I saw this kid eating baby food on at least one occasion. He required a special bat that was lighter than the others, as well as a smaller helmet, probably taken from the tee-ball kids. To his credit, he was an on-base machine. Since it was impossible to throw him a strike (since due to his size his strike zone was the size of an apple) and he was too weak and underdeveloped to actually swing the bat, he was guaranteed to walk. And in Little League, we learn that a walk is just as good as a single.
  
• The Fat Kid (C): In my first year, we had the real deal—a solid 150-pounder named Larry, who looked like ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag in his skintight uniform. He rarely played, preferring instead to sit on the bench to eat sandwiches and drink chocolate milk. He was a magnificent son of a bitch and my best friend on the team and I was crushed when he didn’t return in my second year. We assumed he either had a heart attack or ate himself, but these rumors could neither be confirmed nor disconfirmed.
  
• The Gay Kid (SS): On my team, we called him “Hollywood.” He was our shortstop and had a flair for the dramatic. I would not be surprised if today he were involved in some capacity in an off-off-Broadway production of Chekhov’s
  The Seagull,
  performed entirely by mimes in drag.
  
• The Kid Who Is Definitely Abused at Home (OF): Usually, this kid sits at the end of the bench, looking sad and being silent. More often than not he is ridiculed, but the kid who fit this description on my team was not, since we knew he was a little too screwy to be messed with. And that’s all I have to say about this, since this kid has probably grown into a very deviant adult more than capable of stabbing me in the parking lot of my local Home Depot.
  
• The Total Prick (2B): Usually the second-best player on the team, aside from the kid who’s really nineteen. However, unlike the kid who’s really nineteen, who is too cool (or tired from being up all night with his fussy newborn) to come down on or yell at his teammates for their poor play, this guy is very vocal about his teammates’ suckiness. This kid is despised by the rest of team and more than likely has a hot mom. He also usually has a dickhead name like Chad, Brock, or Lance.
  
• The Kid Whose Dad Will Punch Him in the Face if He Fucks Up (P): Since we sucked, my team was bereft of such a player, but I saw my fair share of these guys in Little League. I recall one game in which the opposing pitcher gave up a bases-clearing double, and then his father, an assistant coach, plied himself from the bench to go out to the mound and smack and yell at his son for a solid four minutes as players and parents stood in horror. His father walked off the mound and the kid continued pitching through tears. When he hit the next kid with a fastball that came in at about 106 miles per hour and then struck out the following kid who was too concerned with not getting hit to swing the bat, his dad greeted him as he came off the field, shouting, “See? That’s what I’m talking about! Good job!” I remember seeing this and feeling grateful that my dad didn’t come to games. I’d take a “no show” dad over a “beat you in front of your friends after a double and leave you crying on the mound” dad any day of the week, thank you very much.
  

If I had a personality, I’d be “the Entertainer,” the guy who sucks but who doesn’t care and has a good time with it. He may have low self-esteem, have a strange home life, or be confused about his sexuality (not that, um,
I
was like this), so he can take on shades of each personality. He will usually grow up and either be named Mid-Atlantic Salesman of the Year or die of a cocaine-induced heart attack at age thirty-one. So I guess I should start selling something, and quickly.

It was in Little League during my tenure as Team Jester that I learned an important life lesson. Self-deprecation can make you many a friend. I was the worst guy on the team, but like everything else in my life, I learned to spin this to my advantage, offering myself as the butt of endless jokes in exchange for being well liked. I saw that you can make those around you feel better about themselves by making light of the fact that you’re not as good/athletic/handsome/skinny/straight as they are. It was at this time that the Joke was perfected. In Little League, the Joke sounded like: “Nice grab out there in center, Billy. If that rocket had been hit to me, I’d have to ask you guys to start collecting napkins so I could clean off the shit trickling down my leg!” In high school, when a friend had to help me with car trouble, the Joke had evolved into something like: “Damn, Steve—you’re like a real man with this car repair stuff. Here you are fixing a carburetor and I don’t even know how to pump gas. I usually just open the hood and spray the shit everywhere.” In college while drunk at parties, I would use the Joke to routinely refer to my tiny penis in front of women—comparing it to a thumb, wine cork, button, light switch, acorn, and pen cap, among other things—in the hopes that if any of these women actually saw my penis and saw that it wasn’t quite that small, they’d be pleasantly surprised.
*

Playing youth baseball didn’t teach me about teamwork, honor, discipline, respect, or responsibility. Nor, as evinced by my .013 average, had I learned any physical skill, since I was fucking terrible and there was no way around that. It didn’t teach me confidence, either, since there is not much dignity in repeatedly failing in front of your peers. Instead I learned about resilience: how to deal with problems and how to cope in less than ideal situations. I couldn’t make contact with the ball if it was on a tee, but at least I had all the Rice Krispies treats I could eat. I learned about humility; how unfounded confidence can be a detriment. I wasn’t going to break any home run records, but maybe I could make it through the rest of the season without crying (although I usually failed in this). And I learned humor;
everything
is funny. Yeah, I suck at baseball and I just struck out, but I think I gave myself a fucking hernia in the process. And it could always be worse—at least I’m not that kid on the Warriors who had a wet dream in the outfield.

I still continued to watch and enjoy baseball after my spectacular failure in Little League. I don’t think my love for baseball could be altered by anything, say, even if I learned that all those stats that I so revered as a kid—Mike Schmidt’s 548 career home runs, Roger Maris’s single-season record of 61 homers, Hank Aaron’s 755 career home runs—were being threatened or surpassed by a generation of juiced-up meatheads with tiny balls. Sometimes you just have to stay loyal.

And today, though I don’t even play in beer leagues because just hearing my coworkers talk about them makes me tired, I still spend whole mornings and afternoons studying statistics, but no longer are they on the back of cards. The name of my game is fantasy baseball, which occupies about 75 percent of my time at work from March until October every year. I am happy to say that all the success I was unable to achieve in Little League or in the majors I have found in fantasy baseball, where, as commissioner of the prestigious Iron Sheik league, I have won four of the past eight championships. Mike Schmidt, I could never be. But if Mike had a nerdy brother who was really into numbers and really afraid of girls, well, I could probably be him.

Chapter Six

On the Relationship Between Genetics and Hustling

M
y Grandpop Brennan won every cruise ship dance contest he entered. He had the trophies to prove it, too. They lined the walls of the basement, mementos of his excellence on the dance floor. He was very proud of them and his dancing abilities. He had no training, either, something he never neglected to mention. Despite being a chubby Irish guy, he could just
move
.
*
It was innate. The only downside to his victories was that he could not share in their glory with his wife, Isabel. Not because she passed away or because they were divorced or anything tragic like that, but because she wasn’t as good a dancer as he was. She was no slouch, but dancing was not her forte in the same way that it was my grandfather’s. She knew this, accepted it, and was “fine” with it. On the cruise ships my grandfather would enter these competitions with the girls who worked in the clubs on the ship. The two of them would cut their proverbial rug and ace the competition, and after each victory my grandfather would present the trophy to my grandmother, dedicating it to her. Then she’d tell him jokingly, but maybe only half jokingly, to stick the trophy up his ass.

The danciest dancers that ever danced.