In which your narrator encourages
you to recycle your bottles and cans.
My mom died when we were little, leaving us three little girls, ages seven, ten, and thirteen, and my dad, who was a crazy Yankees fan. Dad was so lost; he didn’t know what to do with our bangs so he cut them off. We looked ridiculous. Baseball was where we all came together. Sitting on that old couch, watching Bernie Williams and John Wetteland dominate for the Yankees, was where we learned a common language. I’m in college now, halfway across the country from Dad, we don’t get to speak as often as we used to. Still, during the playoff games that start so late, too late for him to stay up for, I call him, the phone ringing and ringing. He picks up, sleepy but hanging in. “You watching?” he asks. “Yeah, Dad, let’s go Mo,” I say. It is our language. I hope neither of us ever forgets.
— JEANNIE CAMBRIA, Evanston, Illinois
MY FATHER DRINKS AND DRIVES.
That sounds worse than it is. Those of you from the coasts might not understand this, but in the Midwest, particularly in Central Illinois, where there’s little more than unnamed roads, cornfields, and chubby cows, beers are permanently fused to your hand. When I go home, there isn’t a moment past 5 P.M. that I don’t have a beer. (In New York, I barely drink beer. Home, though, they just tap a vein when you enter city limits.) It’s just part of the fabric; you go to a friend or neighbor’s home, and you immediately head for their fridge and pop open a Budweiser. People aren’t drinking to get drunk, not necessarily. You just drink because that’s what you do.
Beer is everywhere. At a post-service “mixer” at my mother’s Catholic church, they had a keg. On the Fourth of July, we all had a Bud in one hand and a lighter to set off the illegal explosives in the other. While visiting my cousin, there was a car accident outside his house. We were both drinking beer, and we sauntered outside, curious, beers still in hand. I was downing an MGD when I went up to the responding police officer. I was a little surprised he didn’t ask me for a sip. When teaching me to drive, my father once told me, half-jokingly (I think), “You gotta learn to drive with your knees so you can open your beer.” (My mother smacked him on the head after he said this. Then, from the backseat, she opened a beer for herself.) I feel less comfortable with my father driving without a beer in his hand than when he does. It’s just part of the driving process. My parents live outside of Mattoon city limits, and it takes us fifteen to twenty minutes just to go to the supermarket. That’s one or two beers, right there.
It’s not like my father is an alcoholic or anything; I’ve never seen him drunk, ever, and I’ve seen that man consume many beers in my lifetime. It’s just: When you’re driving for hours through the middle of nowhere, drinking is just a way to get by. When you have to pee, you pull over to the side of the road. My father was pulled over once by a Mattoon cop; Dad got out of the car with his beer in hand. He did receive a ticket . . . for speeding. It’s not encouraged, mind you. Just accepted. Don’t abuse the privilege, and we’ll all be fine.
Every year since I moved to New York, I go back home for a weekend of Cardinals series at Busch. Making it to Busch is less a pilgrimage than a yearly doctor’s appointment, a way to make sure everything’s still working, see if anything weird happens when I turn my head and cough.
A few years ago, in 2002, the year Darryl Kile died and Jack Buck died and no one knew what the hell to do, I flew back for a series with the Padres. Dad and I drove the hour-45 from Mattoon to St. Louis, I-57 to I-70, with a couple beers on the way there, had three or four of the industrial-sized monsters at the game, talked about our lives without talking about them in the way that men do. Then Ryan Klesko grounded out to second, and the Cardinals had a victory.
It was time to drive home, but once we hopped in the car and crossed back into Illinois, we realized with alarm that we were woefully short on beer. There were only four Natural Lights left in the cooler. This simply wouldn’t do. We had made it to Vandalia, about halfway there, when we both finished up our stash. We were rapidly approaching midnight, the drop-dead time when gas stations and supermarkets stop selling beer. We pulled off the interstate and into Vandalia . . . but we were too late. They’d already locked up the freezers. Bastards.
This left us only one option: a bar. One of the highlights of rural Midwestern bars is the To Go option. Essentially, you can sit in a bar, usually sparsely populated, and drink all night. Then, when you’re ready to leave, you slap another seven bucks on the table and get a twelve-pack to take home. I can’t believe there are bars in this country that don’t do this.
One downside: You often have interlopers popping in, with no intention of actually drinking at your bar, soaking in your atmosphere, joining in the conversation. They come in, grab the twelve-pack, and bolt, like the bar is some kind of drive-through. When I’ve been at a bar and seen this, I sneer at the hops tourists and insult them when they leave. Dad and I didn’t want to be like these guys—we were proud to know the code—but with no beer back at home, we had little choice.
Another obstacle: We were in Central Illinois, and the only bars you’ll find open there past midnight sneak up on you. You’ll be on a deserted road, and all of a sudden you’ll see a sign that says “Dietrich—Pop: 1423,” and they’ll have one bar, which looks like a trailer home, with a Hamm’s sign and a couple pickup trucks out front. After that, there will be nothing for thirty miles.
But we were undaunted. “I think I know a place in Sigel,” Dad said. This was not a comforting statement. Sigel is essentially a suburb of Effingham, which is essentially a suburb of Mattoon, which has fifteen thousand people. Sigel has a population of 150. It is possible that they all have the last name, “Sigel.” The town has one stop sign, about forty houses, a post office, and a bar. The types of people who populate Sigel’s one bar at 1 A.M. guzzle motor oil, devour lit cigars, and have food stuck in their beards from 1983.
We were hardly dressed the part. As is expected at Busch Stadium, we were decked out in all bright Cardinal red T-shirts and white shorts. Dad had binoculars around his neck. I was carrying a score book. We had a sneaking suspicion that Sigel’s finest wouldn’t take too kindly to our popping in for package liquor. There would be nothing left of us but a pair of Oakleys and a few strands of hair.
But we needed that beer.
We arrived in Sigel. The exterior of the “bar” was not comforting. First off, it was called “BAR.” It had a sign on the door for “Chicken Fried Steak.” There was a huge crack in the glass of the front window. A flag waved out front with “Don’t Tread on Me” blazoned across it. There were four vehicles out there too: three pickup trucks and a Harley. One truck had a bumper sticker: “I Got Your Jihad Right Here.” We were clearly toast.
We climbed out of the car. Dad looked at me and tried to make a joke.
“You got your fighting clothes on?”
I looked back at him. “Dad, I have a picture of J. D. Drew on my chest. What do you think?”
I made Dad go first. He pushed the door open, ringing an awful, awful bell. I cringed. Here we go.
There were four people sitting at the bar, big dudes, and a bartender, even bigger. They all darted their heads toward the door. We had clearly interrupted something, and we were about to pay. Why hadn’t we kept the car running outside? How quickly could we escape? Being beaten to death by bikers in Sigel, Illinois, with my father, while searching for beer and wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the image of a lethargic fundamentalist Christian . . . well, it wasn’t the most honorable way to die, though it made some sense, really, when you thought about it.
They registered our faces, blinked, and then turned their heads directly back toward the television. They were entranced. The room was silent, except for the TV.
They were watching Mr. Holland’s Opus.
More specific, they were watching the end of Mr. Holland’s Opus, when Richard Dreyfuss’s character sums up his entire career during a rousing concert as an entire town weeps. The music rises, the crowd swells, everyone’s crying. Mr. Holland sure did touch a lot of lives.
Dad and I stood at the front door. I looked at him. He looked at me.
We waited until the film ended, tiptoed to the bar, asked for a twelve-pack of Natural from the moist-eyed bartender, and drank all the way home.
ALFONSO SORIANO is one of those players who drives baseball fans crazy, not least of which the ones who actually root for him. In any other sport, fans appreciate the ease and fluidity of a natural athlete, someone who is able to do the logistically improbable without exerting any visible effort. This is not what we admire in baseball players. Baseball is a game that, if you really wanted to, could go a full nine innings without you breaking a legitimate sweat; half of the game involves sitting down, and for the other half you stand up and then stand around. Because of this, we expect our professional athletes to hustle. (I remember an ESPN.com poll that once asked fans: “What is the worst crime a baseball player can commit: Gambling on His Games, Using Steroids, Using Illegal Drugs, or Not Hustling?” It wasn’t even close: “Not Hustling” won about eight times over.) We know they don’t have to work hard to play baseball, but we like to think we would, if we had the chance. So we ask that, for our hard-earned entertainment dollar, they at least pretend to.
This is not Alfonso Soriano’s strength. Alfonso Soriano is preternaturally blessed; fast, smooth, quick-wrist-crazy strong, a guy who will toss his bat at a low inside breaking ball and just flip it over the wall. It’s frustrating for opposing fans because it shouldn’t be that easy; it’s frustrating for Cubs fans because if it is that easy, shit, why isn’t he doing that all the time? And in the outfield, Soriano carries himself like he is casually shagging butterflies on a lovely spring day, and hey, if he misses one . . . there will always be more butterflies, right?
Cardinals pitcher Joel Pineiro, on a 1–2 pitch to lead off the bottom of the first, throws a lame curveball that is saved from the dirt only by Soriano’s flippant oh why not, I’ve been at the plate long enough already check swing. The ball travels about twenty feet, to where Pineiro grabs it and flips it to first for the first out of the inning. Dad returns with beers for me, Mike, and himself. It’s probably his years of experience, but somehow my father flaunts any alcohol rule wherever he’s at. Two beers per person? Not for Bryan Leitch! Frantically waving for the bartender’s attention at a crowded club? Not for Bryan Leitch! “Sir, you can’t have an open container in your vehicle.” Not for Bryan Leitch! Mike takes a big swig. “At least Soriano turned in the direction of first base that time,” he says. “He’s making progress.”
I check my phone and point it out to Mike. At the same time this game is going on, the Milwaukee Brewers are facing the Cincinnati Reds. If the Brewers lose, because the Cubs’ magic number is one, Chicago will clinch the National League Central regardless of what happens in this game. To Dad and me, this is the ideal scenario: The Brewers lose today, and so do the Cubs. If the Cubs are inevitably going to win the division anyway—and they are—let’s make it so they have to do it in the most depressing way possible: looking at that old scoreboard after losing on their home field to the Cardinals. I wonder if they’ll even have the audacity to celebrate in public. Anyway, Reds first baseman Joey Votto has an RBI single off Sabathia in the first, and the Brewers are down 1–0. The Reds are doing their part. Now we must do ours.
A man next to us is wearing a Cubs T-shirt and a (blue) Cardinals hat. On the way out of our row, he bumps into my father, who bumps into me and spills my beer all over the cement below. (I’ve never seen my father spill a beer.) The man apologizes, and I say, “Naw, it’s cool, man, Weird Guy With Cubs T-Shirt And Cardinals Hat,” though his uniform is not cool, man, not cool at all. I wipe off my jeans and look to my left. Dad’s already gone, up out the other side of the row, off for more beer. No son of his is going to be empty-handed.
THE FIRST TIME I ever had a beer with my father, I had just turned twenty-one years old. Both my parents were drinkers, though my mother took a year-long break from booze when I was twelve because she was in nursing school and needed to concentrate. I was impressed with her seriousness, and her organization: The night after her first day on the job in the emergency room at the hospital, she drank three beers, as if nothing had changed, as if the last year hadn’t happened. Even today, my mother, sprung into a fitness craze in the wake of her breast cancer, still can knock down beers with the most grizzled barfly, though now she always makes sure to know the caloric content beforehand.
Despite all this, I didn’t drink alcohol in high school, which, in Mattoon, marked me as an eccentric at best, a frightening zealot at worst, like one of those crazy Catholic guys who whip themselves so that they do not even think of sin. I’m not sure why I didn’t drink in high school: Everyone else on the baseball team did, and I certainly had lots of opportunities. Maybe it was as simple as: Mom and Dad told me not to. It is not in my nature to rebel against authority—at best, I’m an Authority, may I have a polite word, and if you hear me out, I will adhere to your judgment person. It’s probably a personality flaw.
Anyway, when I was twenty-one, I traveled the forty-five miles home for Christmas break of my senior year at the University of Illinois with a specific purpose in mind: I was going to tell my parents that I planned on asking my girlfriend to marry me. They had met her and enjoyed her, and even though twenty-one is a stupidly young age to be engaged, well, my parents were even younger and stupider when they got engaged, so they were more supportive than they probably should have been. I told my mom first, and she cried and gave me a family heirloom, the same ring Dad had given her, the same one his father, my grandfather, had given his mother, my grandmother. Dad called from work and asked if I wanted to meet him for lunch at Gunnar Buc’s, a greasy spoon watering hole with a robot bucking bronco and old video poker machines that didn’t give you money even if you won. I drove over. We sat at the bar, and my father ordered me a beer.
At this point, I’d drank many, many times—I am not so much a drip that I did not destroy myself as thoroughly as possible in college—but I’d never had a beer with Dad. I didn’t think much about it when he ordered me one, though. We’re all so stupid at twenty-one.
We were halfway through the beer when I told Dad I was going to ask the girl to marry me. We’d never discussed women before—my sexual education consisted of my mother sitting me in front of a Nova episode about Human Reproduction and handing me a book while my father found a lawn, somewhere far, far away, to mow—and, all told, my father was still a Parent to me, a distant figure I admired and feared, someone at the center of my life but ostensibly on the periphery, someone I tried not to disappoint with the chaotic, jumbled, collegiate issues I thought were important at the time. I told Dad very little back then. It felt like a leap to even mention it, but telling your father you were asking someone to marry you seemed like something you were supposed to do. Which is how we’d ended up here. Not that either of us were doing backflips about it.
Dad looked down at his beer and reflexively went into Dad Mode. “You don’t even have a job! How you going to have a wife if you don’t have a job?” He drew out the syllable in “job,” so it sounded like “jaaaaaaaaaahhhhhbbbb,” as if the soft vowel sound underscored his imperative. “You’re a college kid. You don’t know shit. You better get yourself a job before you start thinking about getting married. Don’t you forget that. That’s what’s important: You have to support a family now.” This went on for about ten minutes, some fatherly haranguing about responsibility, about what it meant to be a husband, a father, a man. It meant nothing to me. I was callow and omniscient. My dad didn’t understand me. He was a dad. If he understood me, and my desire to go to Los Angeles and just write, man, write, he wouldn’t be my dad. It wasn’t even upsetting. This was the way it was going to be. This was what we had both expected.
We finished our beers, and we each ordered another. He paid, because he’s the dad. He had talked himself out; I had no answers to the questions he was asking and could not pretend I did.
Then Dad paused. “You know, I think your grandpa would just about shit a brick if he knew I was sitting here having a beer with you.” My grandfather, named William Franklin Leitch, like me, worked on the railroad and at Howell Asphalt road paving, smoked three packs of unfiltered Pall Malls a day, and sired eight children. He was a quiet, taciturn military man who, when he came home from work, lacked the energy or the patience to deal with a massive brood of screaming, wild kids. He would go into his “office”—really just a desk in his bedroom—drink whiskey, smoke, and read the paper. From all accounts, he was a kind man, but damned if he was gonna let you know it. When he was dying, my mother, newly a nurse, took care of him. He showed his affection and appreciation for her care by twisting and yanking her arm hair. “It was the same as if he’d given me flowers,” my mom once told me. When my grandfather met my mother for the first time, he sat across the table at a Mexican restaurant drinking and smoking. Mom says she doesn’t remember him saying a word. She knew that meant he liked her. She didn’t know why she knew that, but she did.
“You never had a beer with Grandpa?” I asked, legitimately curious. What else was there to do with Grandpa?
“Drink in front of my dad?” he said. “Bill Leitch wouldn’t have stood for it.”
We finished that beer, and two others. My dad was never The Dad after that. He was my drinking buddy. I got myself a job before I graduated. (Don’t you forget it.) The marriage didn’t happen, though. For the best. The transaction was well worth it.
WITH TWO OUTS, Cubs first baseman Derrek Lee steps to the plate. In 2005, when the Cardinals were still ruling the division, when the Cubs were still reeling from 2003 (when Lee, amusingly enough, played for the tormenting world champion Marlins), Lee had the best year of his career, hitting forty-six home runs, batting .335 and leading the National League in slugging percentage. Because the Cubs were under .500 that season, back to their natural place in the universe, Lee was their lone source of bragging rights against the first-place Cardinals: Albert Pujols is supposedly the best baseball player in the world; why all of a sudden is our first baseman having a better season? Cardinals fans tried to laugh this off, but we do not take well to ruffians casting aspersions on The Great Pujols. Lee’s injury-riddled 2006 season, along with our own World Championship, felt like karma.
Coming into the game, Lee was 5-for-7 lifetime against Pineiro. It’s always strange when one hitter dominates a pitcher so thoroughly. You see this every once in a while in baseball, one guy just owning another guy for no reason other than some sort of mental Jenga where one piece happens to fit in just right. Old-time Cardinals left-hander Tony Fossas—who looked suspiciously like Luigi from Super Mario Bros., minus the mustache, and whose nickname was, fittingly, “The Mechanic”—had a lifetime ERA of 3.90 and never started a game in his life. And he struck out Barry Bonds nearly every time he faced him. No rhyme or reason for it: There was just something in Barry Bonds’s wiring that made him incapable of hitting off Tony Fossas. Having watched Fossas pitch for the Cardinals, I can only assume few other hitters were wired that way.
Derrek Lee smashes a 1–1 ninety-one-mile-per-hour fastball straight to center field, over Ludwick’s head and to the base of the ivy. He trots into second base like he knew this was going to happen, like there was never a doubt in his mind. He’s now 6-for-8 lifetime. For the first time today, and hopefully the last, Wrigley is vibrating with noise. The old place can bring it, all these years later.
Lee’s still no Pujols. Not even freaking close.
IN NOVEMBER 2000, ten months after I’d moved to New York City flittering with dreams of media stardom, I moved back home. The move was to be temporary: I’d been laid off from my job, was running out of money, and needed to nurse my wounds. I was twenty-five years old. I had no idea what I was doing.
I also owed about $5,000 in rent back in New York that I could not repay. I had never borrowed money from my parents before, but I had no choice. There was no nest egg to fall back on. I had no magic benefactor. I had been living check-to-check for quite some time, which is fine when you’re sure each of those checks will come, but disastrous when they stop. Home was the only place I had to turn.
I had been staying with a cousin, and I made the wretched, murderous drive to my parents’ place for the dreaded conversation. I was a grown man, without a “jaaaaaaaahhhhbbb,” and I had failed. This was my reckoning, and I deserved this.
They were not home. I waited, and waited, and waited, and they never showed. Tired, I left them a note, explaining what I needed, what I’d done, and how awful it had become, and returned the next morning. My mother was waiting: “We got your note.” She looked so sad. My parents had always known I was flaky, and perhaps had my head in the clouds more than was good for me. But it had never come to this before. For the first time, she was seriously questioning everything she thought she knew about her son. Oh my, her eyes said . . . he might really be a screwup. “Let me talk to your father.”
The next weekend, after they had given me the money, with no conversation whatsoever, just a check, I, feeling worthless, decided to visit old friends in St. Louis, where I’d lived three years before. I drove a beaten-up old 1986 Chevy Caprice, my deceased great uncle’s former car, the green mile. About an hour into the drive, I noticed more smoke than there should have been shooting out the exhaust pipe. I pulled into a gas station, lifted the hood, and realized that the car had overheated. It was fried. There was only one number to call. Again.
Dad arrived two hours later, having left work. We sat out in the cold for two hours, picking the car apart, putting this here, placing that there. At one point, the wrench Dad was using slipped out of his hand and cut his left thumb. The blood oozed out, quiet, trying not to be noticed. The gash opened up further a few minutes later, and a large patch of skin was noticeably dangling. Dad didn’t pause in the slightest. He just kept working, as the oil and the grime and the soot mixed in, turning his thumb purple. He just kept working.
The car was continuing to leak, and it was obvious this problem would not be fixed tonight. Dad would have to take the next day off of work and drive all the way back, just to help his failure son fix a car he shouldn’t have taken off with in the first place. We had an hour to drive home in his truck, just the two of us. We had yet to discuss, one-on-one, the money I had borrowed just two days before.
Dad walked inside the gas station and bought a six-pack of Natural Light. We hopped in the truck and were silent, motionless, for about fifteen minutes. He then handed me a beer.
“So . . . did you hear about the Cardinals thinking about trading Tatis?” And so it was. He didn’t yell, he didn’t scold, he didn’t even grimace. We just talked about what we’d always talked about, until I was ready, no longer too ashamed, to discuss the matter at hand.
“Dad . . . I screwed up. I’m sorry.” I told him how I felt what had happened over the last few months was in fact some sort of karmic punishment, my proper comeuppance for a cocky kid the dot-com boom had fooled into thinking he was important. He didn’t say a word. He just handed me another beer and listened, or didn’t, I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. About five minutes in, I stopped. I didn’t need to say anything more, and he didn’t need to hear it. We’d already had our conversation. The beer was enough; it was his tacit acknowledgment: I don’t think you’re a fuckup. But don’t do this again. And I didn’t.
“We’ll get back to the car tomorrow,” he said as he dropped me off at my cousin’s place.
“Bring your work gloves.”
ON A 1–0 PITCH, Cubs third baseman Aramis Ramirez—an annual all-star criminally given away by the Pirates (along with Kenny Lofton!) for Matt Bruback and Jose Hernandez—hits a grooved Pineiro fastball to deep right. The crowd gasps, but Ramirez swung under it, and it lands harmlessly in the glove of inexplicable right fielder Adam Kennedy. The inning is over.
As the crowd shuffles around, I see the man with the Cubs T-shirt and the blue Cardinals hat. Right behind him is Dad, carrying, again, three beers. He’s smiling: Our stash should be set for the next few innings now.
“Here ya go!” he says.
Don’t mind if I do.
KNOWLEDGE YOU NOW HAVE