Ted made it to the stadium by the second inning, and got chewed out by his supervisor. The guy was a martinet. Absolutely no power corrupting absolutely. It was all trickle down from Steinbrenner. The Yankees owner’s ethos was win at any cost, and reminded Ted of nothing more than an inflated baby with a helmet of hair. His default facial expression was that of a petulant scrunched-up five-year-old who was not getting enough candy. The country was full of Steinbrenners and Steinbrenner wannabes. This hagiography of winners. Poor human, fallible, honest, indecisive Hamlet, peanut farmer, lusting-in-his-heart Jimmy Carter was losing the country, had already lost it, actually, to this vainglorious idea. Out west in Hollywood, some handsome monster was already cast, slouching forward, waiting to be born. Steinbrenner fed into and fed the inflated self-image that Ted perceived was growing stronger in New York City every day. As it became less important culturally, this notion of the city being made up of “winners” took up more and more psychic space, like a cancer. Steinbrenner was a symptom of that spiritual cancer and a cause. Proud to be a New Yorker. New Yorkers demand a winner. Really? Why? What gives that particular geographical location the right to demand a winner as opposed to, say, Cleveland? “Yankee Pride”? What the fuck was that? Mickey Mantle should have had pride that he could hit a home run hungover and drunk at the same time. That was a human feat, relatable, stupendous, and flawed. But it meant nothing to be a Yankee, to be a New Yorker, to be an American. It was a uniform. The pinstripes. Like Wall Street. This city on a hill. To cater to this nationalistic heart lurking in all men was evil, and damn good business.
Ted had a book of poems with him, and by the seventh inning, the Yankees had a comfortable lead over the Sox, and the fans started leaving to beat the traffic like Phil Rizzuto. Good thing it was a rainout. The sun was hanging in the late summer sky, like it didn’t want to set, like Ra knew that fall was coming so soon.
Ted liked to let the world sometimes offer up thoughts unbidden, by opening books to random pages and reading what was written there as a missive intended for him. In high school, he would go to the library, close his eyes, and walk blindly through the stacks, reaching his hand out, pulling a book at random, and forcing himself to read it as if sent by God. It was the closest he ever came to believing in Providence. The God of Books. God lurking in books by men. This was how he learned so much about particle physics and neutrinos, of which he now retained little, no doubt exhaled from his frontal cortex on a wave of pot smoke. What stuck with him about neutrinos was that they were massless and chargeless particles and therefore could not be seen, except in the effect they had on other particles as they passed by, banged into them, altered their behavior. In effect, neutrinos were actual ghosts. Ted felt like the opposite of a neutrino; you could see him but he had no effect. He made no particles shift. He liked how sometimes science helped him to know and hate himself more thoroughly.
Fuck science for now, he thought, all it has is truth. Poetry has truth and lies and is therefore truer than science, a more encompassing discipline. He let his finger stop on a page. This was the poem decreed for him. It was by Emile Bronnaire:
Strolling one evening
In the puritan city
We’ll go seeking …
Beyond life the dark fountain
Where the child sleeps.
There the bitter brooks of faded illusions
Will dry up.
In the day without decline in love
Without complaint
We shall live again.
If only, he thought, if only. Without decline in love, without complaint, we shall live again. Somebody yelled, “Señor Cacahuete!”