2.7.17 - Richman Baseball

We were at a Yankees game in the early years after college. It was during a time of Richman’s life when he was living into a calculation he had stumbled into during junior year: that being short was counteracted somewhat by being an asshole. It was a time when he had slid into a temporary groove with his personality, one that bore signs of fleeting comfort, like a guy who just rearranged a big box he was carrying. Richman was a cokehead at the time, a partier, and a raver. He was an asshole who could never be fully unlovable.

He was verging on a drinking problem too, but I gave him a pass on that because of his work life, which was pretty sad. He ran a company that his parents had started. The company wasn’t doing well. And it wasn’t really anyone’s fault, either. They ran an employment agency that got contracts from the city to find jobs for people on public assistance. The more placements they got, the more money they made. It was a viciously political line of work and they often ended up on the outside of some backstabbing alliance or another. Richman wasn’t the CEO, but he was rapidly taking over the company from his declining, much older parents, who must have been nearing 70 each. Everything hung in the balance for him on a near-weekly basis. Not just his job, but the company. Not just their legacy, but the family itself.

So I didn’t mind that every time I saw him he was flailing loose of all of it: drinking, rolling bills up, acting unhinged, doing it with the desperation of the truly committed. You’d see him doing a line and walking around anxiously and he didn’t look out of place. Most of the time there was house music setting a tempo for his ever-lounging dudebro cohorts to sit there in his apartment, dreaming of various elsewheres they would have preferred. Those nighttime daydreams permeated the rooms back then, sad FOMO versions of a morning hard-on. They all looked like seasoned fluorescent implosions. And Richman fit in. He sold the look, that was the thing. I guess it doesn’t take much to look like that.

It was incongruous to see this vision of decadence at a Yankees game, stark against the families and the tradition and the exposure. Rich used to be a Yankees fan, back when he cared about baseball. The most recent time I've heard him talk about baseball, we were in a bar. A lapse in the conversation couldn’t be forestalled any longer. It was one of those pauses that comes because neither of you are women and neither of you are meeting any particular need of the other. It made him start thumbing his phone nervously. He bust out laughing. “Haha, Hideki Irabu died.” The jumble of vowels primed me for laughter, because I didn't know what he was talking about. He turned his phone to face us. On the screen was a photograph — an action shot of a fat Japanese pitcher hurling his big, Santa Claus body off the mound. His face was earnest with all he could muster and his comical attempt at physical extension was laid wide In both Richman and I, the giggling was set off. It was funny. "I’m just laughing cause he was really fat,” said Rich, apologizing a little. And I couldn’t help but feel exactly what touched off in Richman's mind: a gallows humor for not just death but for the physical exertion of this fat man, both of them versions of the same slapstick. The guy's attempts at athleticism equalled his attempt at life itself, where, in both cases, no amount of success led him to ultimately succeed. And it was funny, when you paired them together, and I laughed.

I think the game I'm recalling was before that incident. Richman was there with his friend Dennis, a good-time guy just as resignedly deflated as he. They sat there through the beginning of the game, probably uncomfortably, connecting with the ballpark experience as it had entered & stored in their minds when they were small boys who were openly awed by the bright grass and the TV world splayed in front of them. We were drinking beers, though, and this was a thing that adults did too sometimes. This was alright. It was the 6th inning or so. They were bored with our view from above third base, and way over there, across the stadium, they saw a region of empty seats above the short porch.

“We’re gonna go over there,” Richman said. His voice dripped with that seasoned, fluorescent fatigue. Dennis looked the way Richman sounded, the way he always looked. You could see him as he gathered his things. Something different over there at least.

“You’re gonna be further away,” I said. “That’s the outfield."

And for some reason Richman slipped a moment. It was a moment of weakness, maybe. He returned me honesty, a candor I sensed by the lilting, high register in his response, as he looked at me straight and said,

“You can catch a home run out there.”

My heart melted. It was naive. It was adorable. It was heart-melting. Had he forgotten? Was the slouching yawning party boy bested? Was he stowed or pushed away? You can catch a home run out there. It was a spot on his brain that nothing had touched somehow—not cynicism, not fatalism, not boredom, not disappointment. Formed in the hopefulness of youth, he had stowed the bleachers in his mind as a place of possibility, not cheap seats, a place where sometimes home runs went. And what better thing was there than that? I’m sure I smiled as the two of them walked away.

A few minutes later, I was in love with the exchange I just had. And I watched as, against all odds, a shot to right landed in the exact area he had pointed out and was probably sitting. No way, I thought.

I texted him. “No way dude. Did you catch that ball?”

“haha ya"

No way. “No way. Prove it"

And then came a picture, of a hand holding a baseball, and it looked like it was Richman’s. I studied it dizzily. It looked real.

“No way,” I replied. There was no way. I mean, somebody caught it. He didn’t reply.

A few minutes later, I let it all sink in. By then I was lucid. And I looked again at the picture. In a bottom corner was a small watermark I missed at first. And the background were seats of a different color than Yankee Stadium. I was smiling as I put the phone away. And I thought to myself, there was never any way.