“Yo yo yo! Mr. Peanut, ¿por favor? Mira mira, Señor Peanut!”
The Yankees were beginning a homestand that day, and Ted was working it. He brought “The Doublemint Man” with him to the stadium, and was able to read through it during the lulls in the sale of peanuts. He was impressed with his father’s fiction and noticed certain stylistic tics that he shared, and figured it was genetic. Why would genes determine only physical traits, eye color and left-handedness? Why not other, more subtle, bodiless proclivities such as a love of the semicolon and a propensity to string modifying clauses ad infinitum? Reading Marty’s writing made him feel more his father’s son, biologically, than he had his entire life. He had always felt like a clone of his mother, and if she could have told the story her way, that’s the way she would’ve told it. He was 100 percent hers. Marty saw it similarly. “I told your mother to go fuck herself,” he was fond of saying back in the day, “and nine months later there you were.” But the flow of words on these partially incinerated pages was like a positive paternity test for Ted, made him feel good and nauseated simultaneously. He read:
Baseball is the only game that death is jealous of. Baseball defeats time. All the other great sports are run by the clock, therefore under the dominion of death. Only baseball has the possibility of going on forever. As long as you don’t get that third out in the ninth inning, there remains a chance that xxxxxxxxxx [something crossed out] you can keep plying [sic], a chance you can still win, a chance that you will never die. The Doublemint Man wondered these things as he kissed her, hoping that he could extend this day into extra innings.
Ted was reading this at his locker as Mungo put on his civvies nearby. “You seemed a tad distracted today, Teddy Ballgame. Didn’t see you go behind the back once. Fifty-three percent hit rate. You haven’t been that low since the dog days of ’76 when you had that bladder infection, remember? What’s the story, Jerry?”
“Nothing, Mungo. All is well. That’s the sto-ry. Up the workers.”
“Up the workers,” Mungo replied. They bumped fists and Ted walked into the hallway on the way out of the stadium.
As he passed one of the training rooms where the players received physical therapy, Ted glanced in. He saw the backs of a couple of the coaches sitting in front of a TV, clipboards in their hands, taking notes. Ted noticed the TVs were hooked up to those new machines called VCRs, or video cassette recorders, and they were watching a game from earlier in the year, slowing it down and speeding it up. These machines were amazing. This was the new way, Ted thought, you could now slow down life and see the things that used to speed by unnoticed. They were watching Reggie Jackson at bat. Reggie swung so hard, he’d nearly fall on his ass. The man did not get cheated on his cuts. Ted thought he saw a little hitch right before Reggie began the swing, a little pumping of the hands, that might cause a millisecond delay, and might be the difference between a hard-hit ball and a strike-out. He wasn’t sure if he felt this was cheating or not in sport, but he also speculated that if all of life could be slowed down, he might see it, and consequently play it, better.
Maybe that’s what pot does for me, he thought, slows it all down so I can catch it. Maybe that’s what writing does to life for me. Slows it down. Maybe my writing doesn’t slow things down enough. He wondered if there was a way to slow writing down, or Marty, or women. Maybe cancer was slowing Marty down so he could be seen, perceived accurately, the hitch in his soul. Or women. They moved way too fast for Ted. He wondered if he could put Mariana on slow motion on a VCR, what secret might he see, what insight into her. What was her hitch?
Anyway, he thought he might share his thoughts with the coaches, not about Mariana, though, about Reggie. Like many who were unable to play the game, Ted had great insight into it. Perhaps being barred from success in a thing makes you overly perceptive of what makes success or failure in that thing, causes you to obsess on its technicalities and mysteries; whereas the gifted do not learn, they merely do, the less gifted stew, and ponder, and worry; they learn it the hard way and then they can teach it. The gifted can’t teach what they never learned. It’s why most great coaches were never great players, and the best coaches were always mediocre players—Billy Martin, the mercurial, brawling, recently fired Yankee manager, was a brilliant case in point. Just as Ted was opening his mouth to share what he saw of Reggie’s hitch, one of the coaches became aware of his presence, shot him the hairy eyeball, and slammed the door in Mr. Peanut’s face.