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December 2011
Zito’s wedding date coincides with the start of the 2011 winter meetings, bringing back a memory that makes Tim’s gut clutch. Five years before, he’d been a pawn on the trading table, being shopped to Toronto for a heavy hitter named Alex Rios. Only a last-ditch intervention by Rags had kept the deal from going forward.
Tim’s invitation to the wedding had arrived in early November, spidery engraving on thick creamy paper interleaved with tissue. There was a whole packet of stuff there, including a doll-sized RSVP card addressed in a woman’s balloony script to M/M Tim Lincecum. He can’t remember what he did with it; maybe it's on the kitchen counter.
When Zito’d called him a few days later, Tim hadn’t known what to say or how to say it. Barry’s voice had sounded high-pitched and flat, the way it used to when he’d been up all night. They’d both edged around what they wanted to say, hitching and sputtering like a car engine that won’t turn over, till Tim had finally said I can’t, Barry, and just hung up.
//
Technically it’s true, that he can’t. Tim’s got a prior engagement.
Nate Schierholtz is marrying his longtime sweetheart Kate Eveland that same December Saturday, in Texas, and it promises to be a good party. Pretty much everyone on the team’ll be there.
The weekend’s a blur of colored lights and bourbon-and-soda and a hoarseness Tim can’t seem to cough away. At the reception, their plates pushed away, Manny and Darren put on their sunglasses even though it’s candlelight, and launch into a bunch of old R&B songs, adding some hand jive to the James Brown OWWWs and she’s mighty mighty, just lettin it all hang out. Then they’re leaning back from the table, hands folded behind their heads. They’re making bets on the possible singleness of the five young women at the next table over, who are busy pretending not to notice that they’re being noticed. Romo’s tipped his head to the side the way he does, grinning like a mad scientist, and that’s all it takes to bring the prettiest of the bunch over with her empty champagne glass and a half-smile that makes Sergio’s big dark eyes spin sideways.
The bride’s beautiful, mostly because she can’t stop smiling. Nate, as always, seems to be holding something in reserve, watching his own wedding unfold with an expression that hovers between amused and perplexed. His half-beard and shaved head, combined with white tie, make him look a little like a gangster, but his footwear - Chucks and black-and-orange striped socks - lightens it all up.
After his brother Vai’s given the ceremonial toast and they’ve all raised their glasses to the bride and groom, the lights dim everywhere but over the dance floor. Nate and his bride emerge from different parts of the room, where they’ve been mingling with their guests, till they’re across from each other on the diagonal edges of the big parquet square.
Kate stops abruptly - maybe the spotlight’s too bright? She squints and shades her eyes as though she’s trying to pick someone out of a crowd. And then, just as suddenly, out of the dark, Nate’s there. He slides his arm around her waist and pulls her out onto the floor in a gesture that’s so sure and so right that it makes Tim’s throat close up.
//
The next day, just as Tim’s stepped into the foyer of his Seattle condo, his phone buzzes with a text from Romo.
deadspin got Z pics
LMFAO
Tim’s still hung over - the two drinks he had on the plane didn’t help - but he blows right by the blinking voicemail light and the stack of unopened mail to boot up his computer and scroll through the whole gallery.
The wedding pictures remind Tim of those high-school prom portraits where they’re standing under an arbor hung with fake flowers and the girl’s draped her hand over the boy’s shoulder to show off her wrist corsage. Zito, in a sharkskin suit and slicked-back hair, looks like a small-town funeral director, subdued and attentive, his eyes inscrutable. He places his hand on her tiny waist with the averted gaze of a doctor feeling for a pulse. The bride, whose name Tim keeps forgetting, is exactly what you’d expect: a lovely blue-eyed blonde, tanned and improbably curvaceous in a white dress that’s as narrow and scaly as a mermaid’s tail.
As he clicks through the series, Tim’s eyes keep drifting towards the horizon of each picture, the shock of blue sky against the west Marin hills. The sea’s somewhere out there just beyond it, he thinks to himself, stretching limitless in the distance.
//
Spring 2012
Every year, the Giants’ PR guys gin up a new theme that’s supposed to get everyone stoked for the new season. The 2012 slogan - Let’s Get Back Together - takes up the whole left side of the enormous banner that covers the top of the brick tower at 24 Willie Mays Plaza. The right half’s a ten-times-life-size photo of Tim at the end of his windup, just about ready to let go.
//
In Scottsdale, on the first day of pitchers-and-catchers, the walk from the dugout to the practice field is bristling with cameras and reporters. They’re all focusing on Posey, who’s making an effort to stride through the hitch in his gait from last season’s broken ankle.
It takes Zito a few minutes to notice that Tim’s not there. When Lincecum finally catches up to the group - trotting because he’d had to go back for his glove - Zito feels rather than sees him stride up on the left. As soon as their eyes meet, they glance off, straightening towards some invisible target. When Tim pushes back his hood, Zito sneaks a sidelong glance, and then he has to work to keep his expression neutral. Tim’s hair is winter-long and wild and his skin is as translucent and white as the inside of a shell. He’s as thin as a sapling that’s too green to take sunlight.
-Timmy, says Zito.
- Yeah, says Lincecum, - howzit?
Zito feels Tim’s cold fingers circle around his left wrist and haul his left hand up between them. He’s pressing harder than he needs to, digging in the long nails on his thumb and forefinger. Tomorrow, the inside of Zito’s wrist will be marked.
- Nice ring, says Lincecum. - You gonna wear it when you pitch?
Zito yanks his hand away.
//
Zito's spent the off-season studying harder than he ever did in college, at Tom House’s NPA pitching clinic at USC, where he and Adam Wainwright and Cole Hamels and Rog Lindstrom sing school’s out for summer! at each other in the showers and complain about being in detention. When they’re not watching film and throwing bullpens, that is.
One day at lunch, Chase Whitelaw jokes that the NPA’s like the All-Star Game in reverse.
- We’re all here because we’re broken, he says, with a one-off honk of laughter.
The others join in, because if they don’t laugh, it means he’s right.
Zito, in spite of himself, likes his time at the NPA. He likes the rhythm of his daily commute, and the measured workload, the way someone else has taken charge of who he is. He even likes being stuck in traffic on the 101, where he turns up the volume on old Jackson Browne and Don Henley songs and studies the faces of the people in the next cars over. He knows now why they call it the freeway, this stream of metal and heat. While everyone else is already ahead of themselves, imagining where they’d rather be, Zito sinks back into the seat and straight-arms the wheel and lets the music wrap itself around him.
I never will forget those nights
I wonder if it was a dream
Remember how you made me crazy?
Remember how I made you scream?
//
The Diamondbacks raked the Giants in the opening series. All three starters were roughed up in Phoenix - Lincecum, MadBum, Cain - and even Posey was scuffling in his at-bats. At shortstop, Crawford, who’s usually so sure of himself, was dropping balls and scrabbling after grounders in the dirt. So in the dugout and the clubhouse, everyone’s straight-mouthed, like a platoon of soldiers forced into retreat.
Today, Barry’s first start of the season, nobody’s expecting much. The sportswriters always give him the benefit of the doubt, and this year, the Chronicle’s dutifully reported on Zito’s off-season self-improvement work with House. But it’s not the first time they’ve forecast a new and improved Zito, and since he’s proven them wrong five years running, he's amazed at their optimism. The fact that he’d given up ten runs over five-and-a-third innings in his last two starts, one of them in triple-A, doesn’t help.
Zito’s had to learn to be grateful just like he’s had to learn to keep his head down. What he knows now about pitching is that it’s like a wolf, essentially wild. You can teach it to sit and stay and fetch, but one day you’ll come home to nothing except the sound of a howl in the distance under an empty sky.
//
As always, the air in Denver is hollow and crisp, and even though Zito’s lungs feel only half-there, he can sense the ground under his feet like a good gravel bottom in a swift current. The sixty feet six inches between him and Hector feels as close as if they were swinging a jump rope, hand-over-hand, in an easy rhythm, like summer in the street, kids shouting.
I'm gonna show you what I'm made of, Zito sings to himself, chin tucked. He works slowly, thoughtfully, pitch-to-pitch. When he gets a big out, swinging, he hasn’t been keeping track, and only when Hector yanks off his mask does Zito know to pull up and turn back towards the dugout.
//
By the fifth, the #sfgiantstwitter feed’s buzzing. Back in the dugout, Righetti walks by Zito and raises his eyebrows. At that point, Zito realizes what’s happening. Zito hasn’t pitched a shutout since 2003, and then it was Oakland, against the Rangers - at home or in Texas, he can’t remember - back when he was coming off his Cy year and words like sharp and crisp were routinely used to describe his starts.
In the dugout in the top of the ninth, when Bochy takes off his sunglasses and shuffles towards him, Zito stands his ground. He puts his hands on his hips and shakes his head. As the skipper walks by, he squeezes Zito on the shoulder. Barry wipes his forehead with a towel and puts his cap back on.
//
After the game's over, back in the clubhouse, Zito’s phone rings and buzzes nonstop till he turns it off, and then the reporters pounce on him next to his locker. But the same phrases that were rattling around in his head out on the mound keep playing through: keep it below the knees and moving and I ain’t missing you at all.
When Barry dismisses one reporter’s long-winded question-that’s-really-a-speech with one simple sentence - I don’t know - the game’s over and it’s time to celebrate.
//
The bar’s called The Thin Man because it’s owned by a husband-and-wife team of bartenders named Nick and Nora, and it’s small and narrow, with an old-fashioned tile floor that looks like it belongs in a gas-station bathroom. One whole wall’s festooned with crosses and religious icons, and instead of ordinary lights, there’s a half-lit one-hole birdhouse above each tiny table.
In the rear, through a door with a pediment that says ubisububi room, there’s a private parlor furnished like a run-down college-dorm lounge. It’s good that somebody on the team thought to call ahead and reserve it, because the thirty or so guys who’ve made it over here from the park are so tightly packed in that nobody can move much. Somebody’s used a chair to prop open the steel exit door so they can smoke in the parking lot out back, and a triangle of deep blue twilight cuts through the soft light of the big room. It’s crowded, yes, but Nick and Nora have it covered. There’s a bucket of Mexican beer on ice in the corner, and Nora’s circulating with trays of drinks that look like motor oil and smell like pineapple. Wilson’s got his backgammon board out, and Manny and the Panda and Melky are making book on the Wilson v. Romo ace-deuce match.
It’s like his wedding. All Barry has to to do is stand there, a beer in his hand, like he’s in a receiving line, taking backslaps and high-fives and one-armed hugs from his teammates. Even Buster Posey’s been by to pay his respects, nursing his one drink of the evening, peering up through those guarded blue eyes just long enough to spit out a well done, Zeets, well done before he moves along towards the door.
Like the wedding, thinks Zito, but different in one key way: this time he’s earned it.
And because it’s his night, Zito asks Nick if they’ve got any Don Henley, because he can’t get that fucking song out of his head. He figures maybe if he hears it, it’ll go away.
I thought I knew what love was
What did I know?
Those days are gone forever
I should just let them go but
It doesn’t.
//
When the crowd starts to thin out, Zito tosses back the last of his third beer and it hits him how tired he is. He folds himself backwards into a spindle-backed wooden chair, his right knee cracking and his arm as stiff as if he’s just had a tetanus shot.
As he looks around the room, he catches sight of the one guy who hasn’t yet congratulated him - Lincecum. Tim’s part of a foursome, sitting in the opposite corner with a fan of cards in his hand, a drink in the other, his eyes narrow and his chin tipped back, inscrutable. It looks like poker, Zito muses, but knowing Javi Lopez, it could just as well be something else; the guy’s been teaching everyone how to play arcane card games like euchre and spades and pinochle.
Zito knows that all he has to do is look at Lincecum awhile, and soon enough, Tim turns and their eyes meet. Zito leans forward a little, and his eyes widen. But Tim turns back more or less immediately to his game, giving Lopez a conspiratorial smile that suggests they’ve accomplished what they set out to do. Affeldt slaps down his cards in disgust and pushes back his chair.
Awhile later, when Tim pushes back his own chair, pulls his jacket off the back and makes his way unsteadily towards the exit door, Zito follows.
//
He didn’t think he’d wind up holding Tim’s long hair back, his arm supporting Tim’s collarbone, as the right-hander vomits into the gutter on East Seventeenth. People in the crowd just weave around them, like it’s nothing unusual, and since the party neighborhood stretches all the way from here to City Park, it probably isn’t. Zito fishes out a handkerchief and gently wipes Tim’s mouth; the right-hander’s neck and his hair are glistening with sweat, and there's a rasp in his throat.
Lincecum's newly short hair and his spindly frame take Zito back five years, to their first meeting, when Tim was first called up from Triple A, driving a battered Ford pickup and clueless about how to find his way around San Francisco.
Barry helps Tim into the cab - he’s so weak and disoriented that Barry’s unsure if he can handle it on his own. Once the door’s shut, the right-hander stretches his long neck back and rests his head on the top of the seat. His glove hand fumbles for the armrest on his left, and his pitching hand balls up into a fist as he bends his arm up across his chest.
- Fuck all, says Lincecum, - I’m sorry about this, Barry. Your big night.
Tim’s skin is so white it that it’s stained by the colors of passing lights, and he squirms, his back arching, as though he's got a cramp in his gut.
- Don’t be throwing up in my cab, hisses the driver, turning to look back at them at a red light, his face a closed mask. - Don’t be doing that.
- Relax, dude, we’ve got it, says Barry. He pulls a fifty out of his wallet and hands it over the seat. - No worries.
In the elevator at the Westin, he helps Tim get his arms into his jacket, but by the time they get to Zito’s floor, the pitcher’s still shivering uncontrollably, so Barry circles his arm around Tim’s shoulder and pushes him forward.
What Zito’s not expecting is the look of pure hatred that Lincecum gives him, even as he shuffles out of the elevator, under Zito’s arm, towards the suite at the end of the hall.
//
Tim slumps on the edge of the couch in Zito’s sitting room, his hair a wet black curtain around his face, still shaking. Zito brings him a big glass of water and sits down gingerly next to him, their thighs not quite touching. He holds back from putting his arm around him. Lincecum leans against the couch, pressing the back of his head into the pillows.
- I’ll be OK, he says, his voice hoarse - just give me a couple minutes.
Zito gets up and brings him a blanket, tucks the edges around him. He goes into the bedroom, where he slips off his jacket and his shoes. When he empties his pockets, he realizes he needs to turn his phone back on, but he decides that whatever's waiting can wait. Out on the balcony, it’s still warm enough to enjoy the city lights; he leans against the cold metal of the rails, takes a few hits off a blunt. After a while he goes back inside.
When he pokes his head back through the door of the sitting room, Lincecum’s asleep on the couch, his mouth open and his hand balled up in a fist under his chin.
Then Zito does something surprising. He bends down and scoops Tim up into his arms - amazing, he’s even lighter than Barry’d expected. In a gesture that reminds him of how his father used to carry him in from the back seat of the car after he’d fallen asleep at the drive-in movie, Barry takes the sleeping Lincecum into the bedoom, staggering a little, and lays him down gently on the bed.
As Barry starts to straighten up, Tim’s eyes come open and he squints a little in disbelief, the line between his eyebrows deepening.
And that’s when Zito just gives himself up. He sits down on the edge of the bed next to Tim and uses his fingers to brush back the strands of hair that have stuck to Tim’s sweaty cheek. Tim reaches up and slides his hand around Barry’s neck - his fingers are freezing - and tugs him down.
Tim’s lips are salty and sour with sweat and Barry feels his own skin, warm against Tim’s cold face.
Their first kiss is soft as a breath and as definite, and then Zito feels Tim strain up towards him, lifting his head off the pillow, till their tongues are inside each other’s mouths.
And then Zito finds himself pushing Tim over a few inches, onto his side, so that he can stretch out on the bed next to him, so they can get their arms around each other, because right now there’s nothing else but this kiss, this liquid heat he hasn’t been able to erase from memory.
The two of them have been together and apart and together and apart so many times in the past five years that Zito hasn’t really been able to keep track. The only thing he knows for certain is that whenever he’s gone back to Tim, everything’s been different. Each of them evolving in his own time, in the unpredictable rhythm of his own body, constrained by what was possible and what was wise. Sometimes not even that.
As he unbuttons Tim’s shirt, slowly and ceremoniously, their eyes are locked and wide with awareness, as if to signal that both of them know exactly what they’re doing. Barry pushes Tim onto his back and swings a leg over him, then runs his warm hands over Tim’s chest and belly, his thumbs tracing the hollows below the ribs, the muscles of his abdomen.
- Jesus, Timmy, what the fuck? You’re wasting away. What’ve you been doing? Starving yourself?
//
Tim doesn’t answer, because Zito bends forward to kiss the side of his neck, the corner of his jaw, the hollow beneath his earlobe, and Tim presses himself up hard into Zito’s warm wet mouth against his skin. With his left hand, he’s stroking Zito’s hard-on through his jeans, and with his right, he’s unbuttoning his own.
Tim buries his nose in Zito’s hair, which smells like cigarettes and whisky and something faintly sweet, a smell that takes him immediately back to a time when things had seemed limitless. And the way Zito’s now shimmying Tim’s jeans off his hips, stroking the insides of his thighs and palming his hard cock through his underwear - this is also achingly sweet and familiar and impossible at the same time, like the first hit of a drug he’d sworn never to take again.
There's no ring on Zito's left hand.
When their mouths collide again, Zito’s tongue darting and twisting in his mouth with that old teasing rhythm, Tim feels as if he’s been seized by his own heartbeat, which is now pounding in every part of him that matters - hands and belly and chest and cock - and he can barely get the words out.
- What is it, he says haltingly, as Zito roots his nose under Tim’s chin, kissing the hills and valleys of his throat and all along the blunt ridge of his collarbone - what was it, today, that’s different? How’s it changed?
Zito stops a moment, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He’s breathing hard, as though he’s been running, and he blinks the sweat back from his eyelashes.
It takes him a minute.
- I don’t know, says Zito, - it’s not even worth asking. It just is. Was. You know what I mean.
//
Over the past few months, Zito's done his best to blot out the memory of his relationship with Lincecum. It's been in his interest to put it out of his mind.
But his body remembers everything. As Tim bends over him, his cheek pressed against Barry's back, each thrust matched by a stroke of his wet fist on Barry's dick, their left arms stretch out and fingers interlace and they move as one. Tim's controlling the pace, keeping it slow and deliberate, in a way that's calculated to make Barry shove his hips up hard, wanting more.
But he knows from experience that Tim won't be hurried; he lives for this lovemaking that suspends time, when the pleasure they give each other goes beyond explanation. So he surrenders himself to Tim's rhythm, letting every thrust draw him closer. Feeling Tim inside him, his breath on his spine, the edges of his teeth sharp against his skin, Barry cries out. He's wakened into a dream he can't forget.
//
When he was younger, Barry’d always thought of himself as moving forward - onward and upward, his mother’d say, as though life were a mountain whose summit was always receding from sight, just beyond the next ridge.
Then came the historic one-hundred-twenty-six-million-dollar contract, and the years of struggle and failure, and the desires -and the loves - he hadn’t planned for.
Every pitcher’s lifetime stats, as Baseball Reference has it, should take the shape of a twelve-to-six curve with a predictable but unhittable drop.
What Barry knows now - especially tonight, with today’s CGSO still written rough on his hands - is that nothing happens the way it’s supposed to. Least of all this.
It’s still in his head, that song.
I can see you, your brown skin shining in the sun
You got your hair combed back and your sunglasses on
And I can tell you my love for you will still be strong
after the boys of summer have gone
And what he’d thought that song meant, last year, when everything seemed to be changing -
That’s changed, too.