In a More Perfect World

Twelve one-hundred word scenes about a ballplaying Vietnam draftee and a ballpark ticket clerk.

CW: a few instances of period-typical ableist and homophobic language.

1.

The leisure suit pants are this insolent shade of pistachio green, rising disco-high up on his hips. Big square teeth gnawing at a Marlboro, paisley shirt tucked in tidy, downturned eyes too big for his chiseled little face. Like Twiggy with a crotch bulge, fucking obscene. Lee could double over with rage every time he walks past the ticket booth.

That doesn’t stop him, though. Obviously, because back on the field there are gunshots.

“Podhalanski, if you’re gonna act crazy, just go work out on the concourse.”

So it’s him and this fruity clerk with the Section 8 slump. Stealing glances.

2.

He figures it says something, doesn’t it, that he’s on death’s door in fucking Vietnam and that all he can think about is baseball. Through lashings of unbearable pain, glimpses of gore at his left leg, shitfuck, baseball.

Fucking stupid.

This is what you get, sending some punk kid from Southside out here. All he’s got are tears of bitterness he’ll never bring a trophy back to Comiskey, on account of no leg. And the planes are blaring overhead, and he’s bleeding in the mud, and he wonders where he’d be were it not for being born on Valentine’s Day.

3.

Lee can tell that he’s staring at the wooden cane, but he doesn’t care. He lost all his filters somewhere between the air strike and the hospital ship.

When Lee asks if he served, Pistachio Pants snorts.

“Class 4-F.” He pats at his lame leg, affectionately. “Trusty old polio.”

He gives Lee fire from his match, and they sit there in the empty bleachers, smoking.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to imply you ain’t, uh, a patriot.”

That snort again.

“Well. Can’t say that I am.”

The sunset purples over the Blue Ridge; Lee takes a drag. “Makes two of us then.”

4.

Robin Malott — that’s the name swimming in Lee’s head when he stands in the outfield waiting for flyballs. Robin Malott, commie faggot, punching tickets in Asheville, NC.

Sometimes he thinks of leaving it all for San Francisco. Then he remembers he’s a good spell and an injury away from the Show, and he thinks again. So he stays a closet queer swinging lumber in a nowhere Appalachian town.

“You know you can do better than this.” He tells Robin one night, meaning generally, but also meaning him.

“Oh, I know.” Robin grins, derisively. “In a more perfect world, maybe.”

5.

Skip dislikes his grass habit.

He gets cornered in the parking lot on a road trip to Durham, and with a whack of a hand his unlit joint gets knocked to the ground.

“You stop smoking that shit. I won’t be saying that again.”

“Right.” Lee thinks about the game, about his leg, about gunshots. He thinks about the sound chin music makes when it’s close enough. “I’m sure you’ll love me off the green, Jim. I’m just delightful.”

“You watch it, kid.” It’s all he ever does. “The club’s thankful for your service, but only God’s grace is fucking limitless.”

6.

There’s a variety of answers to the question of whether he’s killed anyone — several declensions of multiple lies.

Lee’s hoping if he perjures himself enough he’ll end up forgetting the truth, but regardless he’s glad Robin never asks.

“Why’d you go? Why’d you not split for Canada?” He asks instead.

Lee’s bed is sweaty and Robin’s eyes are shot all the way out, the joint smoldering at his fingertips. There’s only one answer to that, and Lee’s not proud of it — and not in the way that he’s “not proud” of having helped frag his superior officer.

“Baseball.”

7.

A protest is a lot like a ballgame.

It’s in the little things, it’s in how he keeps his hat on for the anthem, it’s in how he lets the guys call him a fairy and a headcase and a pinko, it’s in how they’re right.

He used to be someone, before the draft. Prospect: something he was, something he had. Now there’s no sense to his life beyond each day — just a pawn in a game.

Marching on Washington he feels a sense of purpose only the cheer of a long inning brings. Carry it on, carry it on.

8.

Every off day he parks his shitty AMC off Kenilworth Road where Robin lives with his brother, who doesn’t know he’s a cocksucking agitator.

“They never think the cripple’s gonna have opINions, ya see.”

Every sound startles Lee these days, cars backfiring, postgame fireworks, mopeds blaring by. Sometimes the crack of his bat on the ball sounds like an artillery round — sometimes he loses it rounding the bases.

They try not to be obvious about this, but Lee doesn’t know if he’s scared of being found out. Truth be told, he’s not sure what fear means to him anymore.

9.

Somewhere in the smoke of the mountains, on the way to Memphis, Tennessee, Lee dreams of a better future.

It’s a side effect of Robin, an adolescent resurgence of fierceness and hope, a carefully tamed animal rattling its cage in his head. In his closed circuit of Southern League baseball, all lined in mauve and green découpage, he’d forgotten to want anything more than peace of mind. The specters he chases are in the past, a self he knows won’t return, and alone ahead is America’s last great unbroken promise. Bats and balls and such.

But now he wants more.

10.

A pothead and a queer and a polack, what a prize he is; the crazy’s just an extra perk.

Here he goes, braced over Robin’s struggling body, trying to kill him or whatever. When the muddy jungle fades from his sight, he realizes it’s 4AM and he’s naked in bed with a guy who can’t walk right. A guy who trusts him.

Shame engulfs him, a white-hot explosion of self-hatred scorching him from head to toe. Combat fatigue, the VA psych had said, nothing we can do.

It doesn’t matter. The fear in Robin’s eyes is the real death sentence.

11.

Smoked-out GI coffeehouse, band onstage, Newport, VA — together they sing along to Pete Seeger tunes.

“One day I’ll bring you to Chicago. I’ll show you Archer Heights, I’ll show you Comiskey. I’ll show you the yards where my father worked. I’ll show you Curie Park where I first picked up a bat.”

And isn’t it wonderful that baseball’s a game of song, that Marvin Miller is at war with the reserve clause, and that Lee’s full of beer and hope, dreaming of a world with no war and all music? All drunk and all red, Robin, the folkies, and him.

12.

Leonard Cohen drones; Robin is dozing off.

“Do you think you’ll make it to the majors?”

The answer is he has to believe — has to believe that it wasn’t all for nothing, that he always had a fate on hold. The war, the pins in his leg, the wreck in his head: all of this for green grass, for red dirt, for baseball.

He has to believe, like children believe in magic, like fools believe in love. He has to believe like he believes in a better world, where things happen for a reason.

For now, Asheville’s good enough.