Class A (25 page)

He was speaking metaphorically.

Now, on the field, I stare at Hank like always. He’s in better shape than he was at the beginning of the season, one of a handful of players who can make that claim. Instead of preparing to play each day, he has prepared his body to look more worthy of playing. Sometimes I see him running his hands down his torso and grinning to himself. But his shirt, his 31, is just as pristine as it was in his locker. This strawberry sucker is his eighth, I’ve counted. His hands are getting sticky, but it doesn’t matter.

Sams is next to him, benched as well, three inches taller, maybe three inches wider than Hank, so next to each other they look like an evolutionary progression out of a high school textbook. Sams is staring at a sheep that has wandered toward them, puzzled, maybe a bit frightened. He is flexing his forearm. I can see it from the stands, contorting with sinuous lines and then snapping back as he clenches his fist, then unclenches, then clenches again. Sams’s right forearm has a black ink tattoo on it, spelling out
Rivalino
, his middle name. He told me once that it means something powerful, something royal, he doesn’t remember what exactly, but it is important to him, that general feeling, and so it is embossed on him. A crown dots one
i
; there is a cross, as well as other symbols of great significance, hidden somewhere in the word.

He touches this tattoo often, does it now as the sheep, rigid and unblinking, glares at him from the grass along the third-base line. It is his most visible marking, also his most opaque, but it isn’t the big one. The big one spans his back, shoulder blade to shoulder blade, enough room for bold, capitalized script announcing a decree:
Live Your Dream
.

“What’s it mean?” I asked, the first time we spoke, as he hurried out of the shower in a cold early April clubhouse. It was a question that
should have been laughed at—no meaning could be more obvious. Another man with another profession would have pointed that out. But this game, the clubhouse, they’re spaces free from irony, and Kalian Sams reached a hand around to feel the words, raised with his goose bumps, and told me, “It’s
everything
,” while teammates nodded.

On the field, Wild Thang makes a guttural, military noise, and something in the monkeys or the dogs or both tightens. Muscles perk, eyes focus. They gallop with purpose toward the sheep, who, even after nearly three hundred shows a year, are somehow not ready for this shift in the drama. Shrieks of laughter are swallowed by shrieks of fear as the monkeys ride their beasts up close to the sheep, who twist and buck, and for a moment it seems as if one will get caught in between two species of stomping legs, that we will be left with the most hopeless image of all, a monkey in people clothes motionless on the outfield grass of a minor-league stadium. Betty grabs Bill’s arm and closes her eyes. Tim screams, “Ma, you old softy, nothing is gonna go wrong!”

Dreams, from the beginning, were erotic. Or, if not explicitly erotic, still undeniably sexy in that they were linked with the fulfillment of what is desired. The granting of wishes that awake, open-eyed, seemed far-fetched.

See Middle English folklore: This lady was the same / That he had so dreymd of.

Even when not literalized with the female form, the dream, as a concept, was still a success:
Good is to dremen of win
. “Good” meant “God” and “win” meant “joy,” but also “striving.” And that faint sense of desperation became clearer later, when dreams were found to be metaphors, and even then, the desperation was hidden in the subtext, never in the intent of the speaker.

Shakespeare: We are such stuff as dreams are made on.

Tennyson: Like a dog, he hunts in dreams.

It is stupid, probably, pretentious, definitely, to be thinking of Tennyson while looking at Kalian Sams’s back. To impose literature and metaphor onto a game and a group of people that want to be taken literally. But it is difficult not to grope for something a little deeper in a space where clichés are not clichés and things are taken so literally that
it’s impossible to know if I’m being fucked with because, most of the time, even when I should be, I’m not.

My dreams, when I remember them, are horrible. It is, I know, not directly related to Sams’s ink, but when I dream of women, they are those I know but with contorted faces. They are on top of me, and they are disappointed. They are asking questions that I cannot answer, and sometimes, often, my body is heavy, almost permeable, as strangely familiar hands prod my skin and tell me to be better. I yell in my dreams, and it is always silent.

The players never seem to be afraid to fall asleep, but it is hard for them, I know that, far from home, always under pressure. On nights when I stay out after games with the players and it’s too late to sleep in my own bed, I crash on their floors, pressed against the legs of rented coffee tables. I see light from under Hank’s bedroom door until I finally fall asleep, and when I open my eyes in the morning, the light is still there, and I think he never wanted to turn it off. Sometimes I hear whispered, unintelligible conversations with his girlfriend; sometimes I hear the creak of footsteps in circles, of a heavy body doing push-ups on a thin floor. And Erasmo and Mario and Noriega, lying like a bar graph in their one-room apartment, how can they not be in one another’s dreams, the sound of close, tense breath ever present, turning into wind and warning when they finally fall asleep just before the sun rises?

But this is not the dream on Kalian Sams’s back. Nor is it the dream that is the answer to almost every casual question I ask anybody just to break the silence of waiting for the game to start.

How’s it going?
Living the dream
.

Is it hard to be away from your newborn son?
This is my
dream.

Don’t you think you should get paid a little more?
If dreams were easy, they wouldn’t be dreams
.

There is stubbornness to it. Honor, maybe, but plodding obstinacy, too. That is where Tennyson comes in, dogs dreaming of the hunt, the way they look as they sleep. Twitching, pawing at the air, a conclusionless effort that does not allow them rest.

I can find only one person who stood up and said the phrase “minor leagues” before a Senate Judiciary Committee during baseball’s antitrust
hearings in 1997. He was Dan Peltier, a career journeyman, parts of nine years in the minors, 108 games in the bigs with Texas and San Francisco, one home run against the Cleveland Indians, the highlight of it all. Peltier began his testimony as a baseball player is taught to speak. He acknowledged how much the game had given him, called himself lucky, reiterated that quickly. He was lucky to have been able to play a game for a living, the way so many want to, and he was especially lucky to have an accounting degree from Notre Dame and enough saved to begin an adult life at thirty. Then he spoke of reality. In A-ball, he made $850 per month. Take out a good $50 per month for clubhouse dues, an archaic system in which players have to help the guy whose job it is to wash their jockstraps make a living. Subtract rent, which he was responsible for. Subtract food. Unlivable.

Baseball salaries are different now. The highest-paid major-league player in 1997 made $16 million less than Alex Rodriguez does right now, a goal too lofty for Hank and Sams to even consider as they hang bored on the dugout railing. Minor-league inflation has not caught up. Hank makes $200 more per month than he would have in 1997, and in rookie ball the salary is still $850 monthly.

If it was easy, it wouldn’t be a dream
.

It doesn’t matter that this sentence doesn’t make sense.

Tim is wearing a bright yellow-green tank top from 1991, custom-made, advertising his Roadkill Crew in hard-angled lettering above a cartoon picture of what looks like a possum, eyes marked with
X
s, tongue out in gleeful death. If the color of the shirt has faded in twenty years, I am frightened to know how bright it was originally, just how proud and blinding it must have been when a row of fifteen identically neon shirts walked into an opposing stadium to cheer the LumberKings, no, not the LumberKings then, the Clinton Giants.

Nineteen ninety-one was a
dream
season, a dream in its symmetry and smooth story lines, a dream in the way that it can be relived, retold, take on significance in the context of two decades’ worth of new happenings. And things are scaled differently in dreams.

The Midwest League championship trophy is a humble one, intentionally so, I think. A thick, polished, dark wood base, a square plaque
embedded in it with the logo of each team. On top of the base is a bronze man the size of a deluxe GI Joe, gloved hand on hip, throwing hand hidden behind his belt. He is nothing like any of the young men who have held the trophy for the last half century. His carved pants are ballooning, with pleats in them, the kind that can only appear in pressed wool. Nine inches’ worth of old-time ballplayer.

“It felt huge” is how Tim describes it to me. “It felt life-sized. It felt like I was holding me over my head, made of metal.

“And then I remember walking into the office that winter and seeing it and it was nothing,” he tells me. “And I thought, my God, what was I thinking? How did it feel so big?”

The giant-trophy moment happened in Madison on a cold night in September, on the pitcher’s mound after storming the field without anyone telling him he couldn’t, in the middle of a team of winners, before following the bus on dark highways home for three and a half hours, banging the side of Betty’s old Dodge and howling.

Tim has, of course, seen more than a few stadium sideshows since that last championship night. The racing mascots—Charlie the Tuna, that inexplicable stork that hawks pickles, and other famous felt faces—who swing by midwestern minor-league stadiums after performing in Milwaukee or St. Louis. Also, those creepy guys in blow-up suits that are meant to be half animal, half sports legend—Monkey Mantle, Harry Canary, Ken Giraffey Jr. The Coors Light Girls came last year, and Tom Bigwood was ready. He walked down the aisle to his seat in slacks and a button-up shirt, his hair soaking with mousse and combed to the side. And he was pretty trim because of the racking pain that his tumors caused him every time he ate, so it was like looking at some new person. It was the only time Tim had ever seen him like that, so obstinately fancy.

Tom Bigwood always wanted to be a player, I know that. Which shouldn’t be surprising, a guy watching baseball while wishing, dreaming, of playing. All of us are him to some extent. But Tom was never good, never played schoolyard ball or Little League or high school, never bar-league softball with friends on Sundays. And maybe that’s why his fandom was so unfiltered and endless, because it was cut with no jealousy, no illusions.

“He was so big,” his sister-in-law told me in her living room three
blocks from the stadium. “So he never had to think,
Oh, maybe I could
, and then find out, no.” She asked him, right before he died, trying to get him to talk over the noise of his labored breathing, “Tom, if you could be whatever you wanted to be right now, what would it be?”

And he said baseball player. Or maybe race-car driver. But probably baseball player. He couldn’t fit in those cars. He’d laughed at that, she told me.

Tim doesn’t know about all that. But he does know that Tom knew how lucky these boys are. These ones, he points to the LumberKings on the field trying to warm up, Hank and Sams right in front of us, watching.

“Wouldn’t you be them right now if you could?” he asks me.

Yes, the answer is yes. If, right now, I was given the chance to drop out of graduate school, tell my girlfriend I would be gone for a while, plan ahead for a five-year cushion of poverty and probable failure into my thirties, I would, without hesitation, abandon any other potential life I’ve worked toward. I would justify it, without a second thought, as the ultimate dream. In the face of such hyperbole, everything else becomes bland and heavy and unnecessary. But just because these players have done what many of us also once wanted to, because they’ve taken ownership of a collective dream, do they deserve to sacrifice for that privilege? The common answer is yes.

Sometimes, at bars in my liberal college town west of Clinton, I play pool with white people with dreadlocks, and they ask me how bad the shithole is and I laugh. I say, “I wouldn’t want to live where those guys live,” not talking about Clinton, talking about sleeping in tiny apartments, packed so close to other bodies, and the hardness of half-deflated air mattresses on tile floors. Every time they say things like “yeah” or “must be smelly” or even “cuuuute,” like how you call grandparents cute, or mom-and-pop shops, anything that’s dead or dying. And then sometimes they say, “Lucky,” or the ones who were mistreated by athletes in high school say, “Maybe they should try something new. Like adulthood.”

I am sending texts now, to three friends.

“Monkeys on dogs. Minor-league rodeo.”

I’m trying to take a picture with my phone to send, but there is too much movement. Tim glances down at me and says, “
Watch
the dang thing,” and I am ashamed.

Chuck and Mailman Matt are saying that those monkeys are strapped onto the dogs. Betty is saying,
“Hush,”
the point is that the monkeys can really do this. Tim is agreeing with his mom. It’s like the fireworks on the Fourth of July. The sputtering and fizzling were laughed at by some, but Tim and Betty ignored those misfires. They pointed to the beautiful, arcing shots, the ones that exploded the way they were supposed to and drifted through the sky until embers touched their reflections on the river. It was beautiful, Betty reminded all of us, and Tim agreed, yes, it was, it was worth waiting for. It was a proper explosion. We were lucky to have seen it.

When the sheep are all herded, it is time for the origin tale.

“These dogs began over on the border of England and Scotland.”

Wild Thang is stroking a pup’s head with one hand, holding the mic in the other, breathing hard.

“They’ve got words over there that you ain’t never heard before.”