I think we might need to create a new heading called nostalgia. I have some pictures in my head that are asking to be put together to make a very specific point about the use of alcohol in conjunction with anything. And it has to do with both playing sports and observing sports and living in a world with major league sports.
I’ve been thinking so much about 1983 and 1977 and 1990 and 1999 etc. I was thinking about all of those games that we attended in 1983, happily chasing baseballs like kids. I was 19. What a clown. Jesus Christ. It’s an authentic thought. What if I, me seriously right now, could travel back in time for more than a calm little pat on the shoulder to remind my younger self gently that he might have more potential. What if it was like opening up a car door and punching the guy in the face who believed beyond belief that it was impossible for anyone to touch him? What if it was more like a slap in the face at least? A simple physical expression of exasperation, anger and that I’ve reached my limit of toleration.
Son. Listen to me right now. This alcohol is shit. These kids are your friends but the fat one is going to die a young man because he can’t control his eating and nobody seems to be talking to him. So take a look at that fat fuck and ask him who the fuck he is and start thinking about who you are. Because that other kid, the Italian kid, who the fuck does he think he is to be sitting in God’s chair?
Now I am calling it God’s chair because when I found those seats, I was like this is me. We are over the top of the fence. We have no impediment to our vision. The foul pole is right here and though I can’t touch it exactly, about two or three steps and I could pat her on her bottom for good luck, which unfortunately I never did or even think of at that time.
And maybe it’s a stunning revelation. Maybe it’s me and maybe this ridiculous speed that I currently possess has always been with me just perhaps suppressed under foot long sandwiches, a constant flow of at least Coca-Cola if not those big beers which I think we’re almost as expensive as the cost of the cheap ticket. Yeah, we had challenge nights. And then I think we used everclear one time. Everclear is 180 proof which means 90% alcohol. Rock and roll y’all, would you like a hot dog with that? How about 5?
But we were kids, right? This is what kids do because this is what people at ballparks do even when they sit in God’s chair.
But wasn’t that the entire issue? And wasn’t it funny that even if the attendances for the Giants, who were not really overachievers except in certain moments, was kind of pleasantly catch as catch can? Wasn’t it nice to have such a spacious place to play in? Wasn’t it nice to have a town that agreed to give me a childhood that I had lost because I was actually an abused child?
Okay. Nice? Isn’t that benevolent Christianity at its finest? Can you imagine that? In this day and age? Some fat fuck stands up and takes on the Dodgers all by himself and suddenly the entire year, the entire team, just everything goes to what? Oh, he was an abused child. Let’s just make him God.
But what if…
And this is where we are all in prison. This game can go on all day and all night like a butterfly effect coming to die on your pillow. No matter how much you love it and no matter how interesting this moment is, organic matter has its lifespan as does public interest in the greatest writer of all time. None of this stuff lasts unless you practice it. As a guitar player, for example, I know this. And you don’t actually have to be a guitarist to learn about this because if you have a phone and you can download a metronome or make a beat that you can live with for the next hour, now you are doing repetitions and that’s different from spastic murder when you need something to channel your extra aggressions caused by anything.
I’m also kind of fond of paper and pencil. It seems you can get a shit ton of computer paper for a penny or two and you can make pictures forever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever without really worrying about it too much at all. And truly, when I was a kid, we played board games. Games to play when you are bored on a board and Google got that right. Thank you Frank Sinatra. That’s a reference to Frank Sinatra at the Sands, an interesting salutation from a long gone moment from a town reemerged from the ashes perhaps perhaps perhaps. The point is, I need some dice bad. I really need some dice. Maybe you do too. There are games that you can buy or learn to play or even play on line I’m sure. I’m just talking about the physical process of doing something on a table that requires dice being rolled so that the moves are understood. Dungeons and dragons? Ukrainians and Russians? G and agent 99? G and agent Orange? G and…
I guess the point is we should play to win but we should also play so we can play again because maybe if we learn something the first time we play this game, we would play it differently the next time. Like for example, I’ve been playing chess with these two knuckleheads for 20 years and we pretty much know everything about each other we can know by now but yet, it’s just not so. Why? You know why? They don’t have any time to notice that we keep eating and shitting games as if none of them ever mattered no matter how beautiful the board was, how authentic the strategy became? What an amazing move out of nowhere that just blew everyone’s mind. How did you do that? Where did that start? How long have you been hiding that one? Cheers, bro. Fairplay!
But what if I wasn’t eating two foot sandwiches, drinking big gulps and big beers and learning how to climb up the ladder so that I could tolerate 12 shots of tequila plus some beer and still be able to ride my motorcycle home? How much of a tolerance had I built up? How much material had I made use of to become who I was at that moment? And how fucking stupid could I have possibly been? Fuck fatty. That ain’t enough. This is the stupidest motherfucker I’ve ever seen in my life. He’s not just throwing it all away. He’s throwing it away for absolutely nothing.
We go hell bent stormtrooper to Seattle. Why Seattle? Pops moved up there. He still got season tickets. Leave it to G. New stadium, New City but he never really liked Tampa Bay. Anyway, we are in Seattle and to tell the truth, it’s an interesting experience but not one I genuinely liked. It was something about the sound. I didn’t like the sound of baseball inside the Kingdom. It sounded artificial somehow and the entire light was wrong. Up until that time, I had seen many many concerts under artificial light, but I had never seen football.
Just a brief history lesson of life with parents with season tickets to the 49ers. They tailgated. I don’t know how to say this if you don’t know what it means but it means kind of like camping in the parking lot of a sports place. You bring a lot of food with you but really you bring a lot of alcohol with you because you’re supposed to be social with all of these people who are supposedly your friends.
I’ll be frank with you, you get into a habit of parking somewhere and you look around and you wonder who the fuck these people are and why are my parents hanging around with them?
But be all that as it may as a completely ruinous element in my life, it seems that all those years required drinking alcohol before the game. And because I was one of those I love to escape because my life sucks kind of guys, free alcohol before a football game plus whatever food you wanted to put in your face pretty much meant I was a zombie for year upon year upon year of 49er football.
Well, let’s jump back to the Kingdome in Seattle and somebody is playing the Seahawks. Pops is not really that influential in the North so we are in the end zone. Little high up. Nobody’s complaining. I was the only one in the family that ever sat on the 50 anyway, consistently that is. G always has the best. But there we were, me and pops, just the two of us and we were on the upper deck and we were looking down at a Seahawks team that was working on the last 12 yards before the stripe. And sober as a judge and having been paying attention with all of my intellect The game on the field, pops don’t drink and we didn’t have a tailgate party for this one, I saw the weak spot in the line and called the play. I just told my dad that they were going to run off right tackle and then I named the blocking pattern and it happened and it got a first down.
I was reminded by a friend, and this is probably why this entire essay is happening, that when I was playing football in high school, our JV head coach invented some weird ass play called popcorn which was one of those things like only three linemen and guys line up left and right and it’s a long snap almost like a punter. And I don’t know where he got this play or what the deal was but we ran it once and then in practice, when they did it again, I was on defense and when I saw them line up, I improvised a counter play for the defense and For some reason, everyone on the defense listen to me. It must have been how I said it. And it worked because we stopped them for no game. I’m not going to say the coach’s name but I remember him but I also remember that he smiled at me and said that that was not supposed to happen. That’s right. I stood up as a leader because I knew how to do the job and what needed to be done in a place where absolutely no one believed even for a single minute that they should ever believe or respect anything I ever said or did. Ingrained almost at DNA level.
Meanwhile, back in Seattle, pops blinked and smiled. He never really wanted to know that anything could ever really be dangerous about me. That’s the thing about two men being together. They need a buffer. And if you have two psychotic men, which is the same man that don’t really think through problems or at least think of the future, perhaps the way a very nervous woman would, they tend to fire up when they get with each other. And me? Oh boy, you have no idea how much weight they put on me to suppress me so that pops could keep going in the business. You have no idea who I had to be.
So, sobriety. We are not talking hand of God although if you want to say that my ability to Sherlock Holmes something quickly and effectively is hand of God, the complete works of Sherlock Holmes was 2 kg. Read it and tell me what happens to you. But just from experience, and I have never delved into anything that you might consider drugs. I’m talking about the burger places and the chicken places and the breakfast places and the after bar places and the food trucks and the hot dogs stands and all that food that came from the body of animals. I’m talking about all that food that was available for purchase readily in any, thank God I am here, city in the world.
For example, I have to step outside the law for a moment and time travel back to another place and time in another dimension even where such things as a friend says here try this and I say okay. This is one of those vape devices. He said this is the latest thing. Everyone is doing it. You suck on this and something happens. I asked what was in it and he kind of waved his hand but said don’t worry about it. I’m thinking this is what you need. Or at least this is how I interpreted the information he gave me. Because he was my friend, in my mind, I thought I might agree. Does curiosity kill the cat? Am I willing to die to try this new thing? Well, I did it, we do it and it happens all the fucking time, doesn’t it
It was shit. I understood that it had some chemical connection to something that you might smoke. I understood that you could buy all kinds of shit that you could smoke and make smoke and brings smoke into your body and then blow smoke through the air and it was easier than carrying matches around because often the wind would blow and you know you can’t really light a match and I think they made movies about the last match saving humanity from the bad guys blah blah blah blah blah. I didn’t like it. I told him. This is chemical shit. I said it, in you know, the language that was in play at the time. Que pasa?
I’m not saying that weed would have helped because it would not have helped. I’m not saying marijuana would have helped because marijuana would have not helped. I’m not saying cannabis would have helped because cannabis would not have helped. I had already had cannabis and already agreed that cannabis causes paranoia. Can you imagine? They actually have a drug that could make this guy paranoid.
But then, we juxtapose all of this knowledge of everything against everything that has been juxtaposed against all of the knowledge since then and we have a different perspective. It seems that marijuana probably had something to do with this kid being at the ballpark chasing balls. This is not to say that this occupation is so wonderful except perhaps in the paraphernalia business… (editor’s note: shut the fuck up – Ed).
But all of this private non-commercial non-brand searching digging into this kid’s past has definitely told us that he had experienced marijuana and bilingual, biracial and unilaterally more than single female relationships despite all of the pity that the misery of the child’s upbringing publicly. If this were indeed the reason why this absolute catastrophe was allowed to be.
So let’s stop.
I’m directing this play. Let’s say this is my seat in the theater. Right here. And the stage is over there. And let’s all understand that we’re looking at the stage. I may be God as far as you and all of your friends and family and all you other bilingual beggars are concerned. But that doesn’t mean bupkiss or, if you can hear John Facenda’s voice one more time, saying the greatest name in the history of football, Dick Butkus. (Дік Боткіс, уордс ту да уайз).
Baseball players who sit on benches are called meat on the seat and it was the greatest shame to be nothing but meat on the seat. That got shortened to meat as a way of talking to another ball player. Hey meat, what’s the plan for the day?
How about we just agree that if it’s my show, it’s my show. And if y’all want to get ambitious, get ambitious and we can quietly talk about who the next showrunner should be. Maybe we have a lot of shows instead of great big shows and all these little shows can have showrunners too. Maybe every little town has every little person who has every little dream to be a showrunner.
But maybe I’m running the show in Candlestick Park. Maybe I’m sitting actually in that seat just behind the first base dugout where kind of the owner was that day when they made me the man. What if maybe the day they made me the man and gave me that seat just to watch the game from where the rich people were one time. I know that they were just showing me a picture. Someday kid, if you put your nose to the grindstone, you might actually be someone who could sit here too. Nice, right? None of us actually heard this conversation that day. None of us actually knew anything except that I knew some friends in high places who had some tickets and dropped them on me because they knew that I like the Giants and on that particular day they just didn’t give a shit.
Professional courtesy. Nothing more, nothing less and if you notice a slight Italian accent in my voice during this reading, you would be very astute.
But what if I said stop and everybody just stopped? What if that day from the owner’s box I said stop and everybody stopped? What if I said stop and it was that field of dreams thing where the kid comes off the field and immediately becomes the old doctor and the doctor saves the day and the little girl doesn’t choke on the hot dog and everybody loves each other but the doc has to go back to infinity because he has already had his life or something like that? What if I just stopped it like a conductor calls for silence and suddenly I did a little Jacob Collier on Candlestick Park with the full-on willingness of every single person in attendance. My dad liked color. I’m wearing really faggy pajamas but they’re kind of cool to look at so if that makes you happy, I’m just not skinny and I don’t speak in an English accent and I’m actually not that good at growing hair on my head. I have talents but that boy is cute and smooth and I might have even had pimples and I definitely needed to wear glasses. But this kid is now running Candlestick like an orchestra.
What if I’d been there with the magic to pull an airplane out of the sky on this given Sunday? What if I could make a road all the way out to the foul pole in left field? And what if I could…
With my hands raised I have every single player, umpire, broadcaster, vendor and ticket holder watching me for tempo.
Can we have a moment of total silence please. I understand I’m going to have to raise my voice here so for the purposes of the literature, I’m going to start in a pretty good solid volume for a human voice. If all the people are silent, let’s say I’m just loud enough to get a slap back from center field.
Hey. Hey you, shithead. You. Yeah you. You sitting in the $5 seat next to the fucking pole.
Me?
Yeah you. Do you play ball?
Kind of.
Are you good?
I don’t know. I never really get tested.
Do you want a job?
More than life itself.
This team is kind of fucked up, isn’t it?
Yeah.
Why is it fucked up?
Here is a pretty significant moment really. I realize that I am playing the owner in this moment but let’s say I flip around back to the outfield and this is me listening to the entire stadium stop to talk to me. Believe me, I don’t have these fantasies. This would be probably the worst thing that could ever happen to me. Complete and utter exposure to the public like I had been a complete fool every day of my life up until that moment and no one had had the key to stop me. Nevertheless, up until that point nobody had ever asked me my opinion. So I guess if I look really hard at the field in front of me and all the players and all the fans and my friends and even myself, I guess I could Sherlock Holmes this.
We don’t really care.
Good answer. Do you care?
I really care.
There is a rumble from the stands. That’s the thing about public debates. The people in the audience are actually there for their reactions. I understand how we have all been taught to be in a crowd. We have been taught how to sit quietly, how to purchase food and what things we can and cannot say. You know, like that stuff you just don’t say it airports. You know, like going to public festivities where your bags get checked for bombs etc. Oops, there it is again. You can’t say certain things because, well, the world’s become kind of fucked up, hasn’t it? What came first, the security guy or the problems the security guys cause?
But back in the owner’s box, I am no longer talking to the younger me. Now I really am acting like an owner, or like a boss. Here I am talking to every single one of the probably 18,000 people who are there that day. Maybe we were busy at 24,000. The Giants were not selling out every game and honestly, I don’t think anyone ever thought that you could sell out of baseball game except for the World Series. Or maybe they all-star game. Or maybe the playoffs and opening day. And the day we say goodbye to Old heroes etc etc.
Hey. All the rest of you assholes. It seems we have a miscommunication here as to what is amusement and what is sport. Here on the field we have something called sport and we sell tickets and food and we make sport into entertainment. Here we have a kid who I believe wants to play sport but he has no way to communicate with sport except as entertainment. If I’m not mistaken, here on the grass field, sometimes a ball will fly and the guy will lay out and make the catch and then land on this very soft beautiful well manicured grass. And we all applaud this and we give these people good money, sometimes sums of money reserved only for the greatest business leaders or the most corrupt politicians. People will literally give up their lives for the chance to witness the ultimate representation of a man who is even willing to risk his own life just to do the job for his team.But if I’m not mistaken, that fat son of a bitch lays out on concrete and steel to catch a baseball that happens to fly near him. Have we seen that a few times?
More than a little bit of low rumbling. The political call however is not even close.
Listen, I’m not here to fuck with you. You all know who I am. You all know who he is. And I’m saying that this guy is the future of the Giants. And I’m saying that he doesn’t have to go very far to get into shape and maybe this team is going to be something that we’re all going to remember for a really long time.
San Francisco Giants championships since 1983
So listen folks, I’m starting to hate this God level shit. I don’t mean I hate it, it’s just kind of like when I was riding bikes in New York and this was after 9/11 and we were just sort of mopping up and dealing with the new fascism and all the security and the smoke of course that didn’t go away for like 6 months. It was a pretty depressing time and I was doing some soul searching. I couldn’t really see a future in the bike business in New York. Looking back, there are riders still in business because people who want to ride bikes with cars is always an awesome profession. I am personally of the belief that we could just take the cars off the road except for emergency and public vehicles and let people ride their bikes or e-bikes or golf carts as needed to take care of their needs. Make those things available for rental when people absolutely positively have to get out of town.
But what I’m trying to say is that I was bored. I’m telling you, if riding professional New York City bike messenger is not rock and roll, I want to know what profession it is? Are you going to tell me that someone’s going to pay me some money to go to a particular place and pick up the rock and then get it through literally cars and trucks and people and other bicyclists and everyone working and the service vehicles and every other fucking thing including the potholes and the tracks and the meat packaging bricks and the hills and when they don’t patch the holes and the ice cracks up the asphalt and all of a sudden you drop your tire in a hole and the world is approaching you. Some body once told me about bicycling in New York. How could you get bored of something like that? How could you get bored of life and death bare-knuckle work? And no, I didn’t wear a helmet.
But they did it. They found a way to depress everybody. They found a way to bring everybody down again. Every time people start getting a little happy, leave it to Christian authorities to drag it back to the bottom again. Misery. That’s the only thing that is allowed. Ask all the women in my life to tell the absolute truth as if it was their last day on the planet. Misery is all they understand, misery is all they know and misery is all they do. Everything that they love is going to die and they know it every day of their lives. And so it goes on and on. No matter how beautiful something is, it is our human duty to ruin it for its own good.
Can you imagine living in such a world? Just try and make something beautiful and see what happens. Just try to do something genuinely positive for the ecology of the planet and see how much love you get back for it or how much help you get for having such a good idea in a world where nobody has a spare minute to do anything but think of making more money.
But if I am blessed, it seems the Giants got good when I had some of these extreme moments in my own life. I’m not saying that anyone could do this. Everyone who reads the Bible and gets into it we’ll see pictures that relate to their lives. This is true for every single piece of every single art. That’s the point of art museums! That’s the point of literature or journalism or anything where somebody talks to a bunch of people. And I apologize that vox popular is one of the first places that the fingers of any government likes to hang out. But all of this wonderful super spy bullshit that I have all over me apparently, If I do the statistics for the entire Giants organization, they rose when my life got interesting.
They finally got to the playoffs when I got with my wife. And then the guys really got it together when I was stuck in Poland. The Giants actually made it into the World Series with Barry Bonds when I was stuck in Poland. And then we had an interesting bit of exuberance that had to do with a bearded reliever who was afraid of nobody Right at about the time that I was writing plays with my classes, broken up from the family and on the way to some diabetic circumstance. That beard was so interesting. They used to put it on their airplane. This ironically enough came about the time that I was writing the play Paradise from an apartment that I had moved to after my family had fallen apart and all I had was my teaching to justify my existence. And the god section of that screenplay was written in Columbia medical Center.
It seems that the moments in my life that have the greatest interest are the moments the Giants have where they rise. Maybe the truth about San Francisco is that it’s a laid-back city. Or, maybe it is a city that has been depressed by an outdated idea of how we understand our world. Or maybe it is a complete refusal to accept all of the modern philosophy being offered by voices from San Francisco as loudly as any such voices are voiced anywhere.
Jeffrey Leonard, left fielder for the San Francisco Giants in 1987, I believe, famously said to the press during the playoffs when all the boys get the extra press that he was the kind of guy that if you invited him to your mother’s house for dinner and your mother served a cake and the cake was bad he would be the guy who said, Grandma, your cake sucks. And I heard him say that because we all heard him say that because they said it in the press because Jeffrey Leonard said it. If Jeffrey Leonard didn’t say it, God bless the writer who did say it. If Jeff Leonard said it, God bless the writer who caught it and put it in writing because that’s who we need to be. Nobody is nobody. All I see is a body.
So this is me and here’s the thing. They had Kingman. If they had let Kingman develop in 1971, a year that the Giants were good by the way, this is also about the time that we came to San Francisco, I think we would have seen a couple of balls go into the upper deck and left field. I was a right-handed hitter. I was a right-handed hitter who could hit home runs. You know I saw that that left field upper deck was there. But they got rid of Kingman before he had enough cracks at it because I think that one on Waveland avenue in Chicago would have got to the upper deck easy peasy lemon squeezy. I think there was any number of Kingman moonshots that could have made it to the upper deck in candlestick. But I’ll tell you what else, just on the principle that I’m not lying about 500 ft dead softball hits or 400 yd golf drives to a plug, if this was my team, I think I probably could have done it once or twice.
But that’s all great for a young man with muscles. Let’s say it’s still me and at the end of 10 or 15 or however many years before my ligaments snap and there’s nothing left of me, maybe even 3 years. Maybe it never worked. But maybe, it is me and they keep me because I’m me no matter what and I become me somewhere along the line. Maybe because I have a regular job, things with the ex-wife we’re not so bad. Crap, she was a Catholic. How’s that for making a compromise?
And here I am at my current age and all things being equal, I understand something about ecology and life and what one needs to live a really good life. Maybe I am actually a voice in San Francisco worth listening to.
I think it’s time to clean up the estuary. I think it means actually acting as smart as you folks like to tell people you are. If you actually have fucking Google and a legitimate portion of the electronic information world at your disposal and your economy apparently exceeds countries the way Babe Ruth used to hit home runs more than whole teams did. Maybe we just collectively say ecology and then see what we can do about getting the A’s to remain a permanent part of the East Bay landscape and then we can worry about what the Giants have to say to the Dodgers this year.
Listen, bro. People don’t do this shit. But I do. That’s why I’m G. Good luck living your own life. Make it a real rock and roller. Make them remember you were here. Just try not to hurt other people on your way up and on your way down and on your way back up and on your way back down and remember that if we’re not gardening, we are in Babylon.
And please remember I said that.
And one more thing that has to be said. If this whole story is true about my yelling at the Dodgers, understand why I was able to stop the whole stadium and the Dodger organization. Everybody knew me and everybody knew I was a fool. Suddenly the fool opened up and spoke absolute articulate truth about the financial nature of the Los Angeles Dodger organization and what it had done to public understanding about this team. They had sold us that they loved their players and they couldn’t keep an infield together because of love. And then when the meat was used up, all of them were sent elsewhere. And yes, I have an autograph from Steve Garvey. Sinful? No. He signed my ball when he was with the San Diego Padres. So let’s not be too mystical about all of this. Maybe that business with Kurt Gibson was hand of God and maybe standing up and yelling at the Dodgers was hand of God. But the reason why I was able to make a shockwave big enough to stop a Fernando Valenzuela win was that I simply spoke the truth and everyone understood my words.
I think if I just had the ability to vote and people thought my words were worth listening to then none of this is wasted effort. And even if they manage to take me out, this is who I was. Read. Learn. And then write and speak yourself.
