Work Text:
Busch Stadium, St. Louis, 19 October 2012
Visitors’ clubhouse, 5 p.m.
I wish I knew
Oh wish I knew
Brian Wilson’s singing, holding a pretend microphone to his mouth. His raspy falsetto cuts right through the din of the clubhouse.
what it’s like
to be free
Brian strolls over to the corner locker, leans over and horse-collars Barry Zito, who’s got his chair jammed up against his locker, head bowed, thumbs in his lap just touching, eyes closed. Brian, who’s bleached the crest of his fauxhawk and painted his nails black-and-orange for the post-season, buries his considerable nose in Zito’s hair, which has gotten so long and wild that chunks of it hang forward into his face.
wish I could say
all the things I wanna say
Crawford, Vogelsong, Mijares, the clubbie who’s scrubbing the infield grit out of Sandoval’s cleats - everyone in their corner of the clubhouse quiets abruptly, and waits.
Zito is scheduled for warmup in an hour and forty-five minutes. Like most starting pitchers, he walls himself off from contact on the days he’s starting. Tonight, Game 5 of the NLCS, the pressure is beyond intense. The Giants have dropped three to the Cardinals, and a loss tonight will send them back to San Francisco empty-handed.
Zito’s hands spike up and seize Brian’s shoulders, and then shove Wilson back so hard that he nearly trips over Mijares’s pushed-out chair. Then, when Zito turns toward the big room, his hair in his eyes and his eyes half-shut with smiling, the room lets out a collective breath. Crawford sidles in and snaps the elastic on the back of Vogey’s sweatpants and Ryan clocks him, harder than he means to, with an elbow.
- Brian, says Zito softly through his grin - do us all a favor, dude, don’t quit your day job?
Brian just grins back at Zito through his big black Old-Testament beard.
How sweet it’d be
If I knew I could fly
he wheezes, standing with his hands on his hips behind Zito, voice cracking on the high note. And then he’s still singing, the sound checking and jolting with his stride, as he dodges away from Zito, who chases him out of the dressing room, wearing only one knee sock and his underwear, his long hair flagging behind him.
//
In spite of the $126 million contract and in spite of his sometimes double-digit ERA - in spite of his dates with Alyssa Milano and a long string of nameless blondes with thoroughbred legs - Zito is loved. He drives an eight-year-old dinged-up Porsche, reflexively picks up the bar tab, and he’s always in the thick of the dugout scrum that’s waiting to high-five the scoring base runner. Even in triple-A Fresno, where he’s been sent down more times than he wants to remember, the youngsters love Zito. And that’s in spite of the fact that they’re making league minimum, here in the flat hot Raisin Capital of America, and in spite of the fact that most of them likely won’t ever be called up themselves.
The fans have been less forgiving. This is San Francisco, so they don’t throw car batteries or beer bottles onto the field. But plenty of times, Zito’s been booed on the walk back to the dugout, and there’ve been threats and creepy messages from people who’ve hacked his phone or his email. A couple years ago, when all the guys were doing it, he got a Twitter account, but it didn’t take long for his inbox to fill up with rattlesnake epithets and garbled drunken threats from people with screen names like DFAZito. When he saw the one that said let’s put out a contract on the dude with the contract, he closed the account.
//
Tonight has the aura of a death-march for the Giants, down three games and facing elimination. The Cards, who dispatched the Nats handily to get here, have stomped all over the Giants figuratively and literally - in the first game of the series, Matt Holliday blew up Scutaro at second base on an evil slide just because he could. And it’s all happening far from home, in St. Louis, where every night they’re being deafened by a stadium full of Cards fans that’s making them see every shade of red.
No one will say it, but yesterday’s 8-3 loss was the worst, like getting punched where you’ve already got a bruise. And mostly because of Timmy.
Last night Lincecum got his first actual start of the postseason, on the strength of eight nearly hitless innings in long relief. When Bochy’d announced the start, Giants fans found themselves sliding into a familiar cycle of hope-against-hope. Everyone watching held their breath as Lincecum trotted out onto the field, skipping over the first-base line, as he kneeled to double-knot his shoelaces and then straightened up to scuff up the dirt on the first-base side of the mound. But pretty soon it was obvious: the old dominant Timmy they were looking for wasn’t going to show up. He couldn’t make his pitches move sideways or break or even stay down. Jon Jay, the Cards’ leadoff man, pinged Lincecum’s first pitch of the game for a single, and it went downhill from there, with Tim giving up four runs before Boch came out to take the ball away from him in the fourth.
- He was leaving things up, said Yadi Molina in the Cards’ postgame press conference, - he’s gonna do that, man, we’re gonna crush him.
//
The Previous Night
Lincecum ducks out of his own postgame interview sooner than usual. It’s not hard, since most of the reporters don’t really want to meet his eyes; they pretend to scrutinize their notepads or squint like Clint Eastwood in the glare of the pole light. Face it: he’s not the only one who’s relieved to get it over with. This could have been any of his postgames this season, his beanie pulled low over his eyebrows, his face set in a patient mask with his lips pressed over his teeth and his eyebrows quirked up like fuckin’ Joe Buck.
As he grabs his keys and starts to pick his way around the laundry carts in the visitors’ clubhouse, Tim feels rather than sees Theriot slap him on the ass, and Pagan’s sweet scowling salute from across the room, his wet hand spraying drops of shower water. Finally he swings through the double doors to the tunnel, soaked in that slick of isolation that sticks to a pitcher after a really devastating loss.
Empty - yessss, he thinks to himself, - clean getaway. And then he catches sight of the two of them all the way down at the parking-lot door. Zeets, in baggy-ass jeans, his feet stuffed slipper-style into his Vans, has one arm around his wife’s shoulder and his right hand propping open the door. His head’s bent hard to kiss the top of her forehead in the place where her hair starts, what’s that called?
And then she slips under Barry’s arm through the cracked-open door that whooshes shut with a schrock behind her. That leaves Barry and Tim standing like gunfighters at opposite ends of the cinderblock tunnel, their faces blank and the red signs over their heads glowing E X I T.
Lincecum feels his eyes widen and strain and then squint a little - his vision’s not what it used to be - Zito’s face a familiar but tantalizing blur in the distance. He fumbles open the side zipper on his gym bag for his glasses - he’d popped out his contacts before the postgame so he wouldn’t have to see anyone’s face too clearly. But the corner of his eye picks it up regardless, Zito’s arm stretching out toward him like some weird sign he’s supposed to know. And at that moment he knows it for what it is.
Later he can’t remember how he got there, only that he did. And the way Zito’s whole self came around him in a hug that wasn’t slaps and pats, but hips and legs and heart and breath, and the lock in Tim’s throat clicked open and his eyes squeezed hard to keep back the tears.
//
- Drinks, says Zito on the way out to the players’ parking lot, not a question but a command.
When Tim looks sideways at him, the question thick in the air between them, Zito keeps his eyes level ahead, his skin glazed yellow in the sodium lights, the hair on this side of his part curtaining his face.
The bar Barry picks for them, five minutes from Busch stadium, might also be a Chinese restaurant. There are five-gallon buckets of spent cooking oil next to the dumpster in the parking lot, and the fringed paper lanterns over the booths and the Year of the Rat coasters suggest the place has another personality during the lunch rush. But it doesn’t take Tim long to see the logic of Barry’s choice. The big room is walled with flat-screens and a massive black hole of a sound system. All eyes are trained on the strobe-lit karaoke stage where a guy with bent-sideways hipster hair is howling out ‘Son of a Preacher Man.’
For a long time, they’re just sitting there in the booth, knees pointed away from each other beneath the table, Tim fingering the welting on the red vinyl seat and Zito tapping the metal edge of the table with the pads of his thumbs.
- She doesn’t, says Zito suddenly and eventually to the air between them, - it’s not an issue, Timmy.
Tim’s eyes flash up to meet Barry’s, and then back down into his untouched drink, where the melting ice has floated a clear layer on top of the bourbon.
- It’s usually you consoling me, Zito continues, - you’re the expert.
- A bulldozer, says Tim suddenly.
Zito raises his eyebrows. - Scuse me?
- A bulldozer, says Tim, - is the right tool for the job, this being my year for general all-around suckage. There’s more mess than one guy can clean up. Over one drink, he says, flicking his glass with the fingertips of one hand.
- And yet here we are, says Barry. - Nothing turns out the way it’s supposed to, Timmy. Why should you think you’re any different?
Their eyes meet for a long moment, both of them considering.
- What I need is not a drink, says Tim in the midst of the gaze, - I think you know that, Barry.
Zito rifles his wallet for two twenties and then leans forward, his elbows on the table, using his nail-bitten fingers to fold the bills painstakingly into an origami bent-necked bird.
A wave of sound makes it too loud to talk; a blue-haired girl with tattooed forearms is belting out ‘Hit Me with Your Best Shot’ and the table full of drunk techy-looking guys near the stage is howling and making pew-pew-pew noises, pointing gun-fingers at her.
Tim levers himself up and out of the banquette, expecting Barry to do the same, but Zito stays put, hunching down further over his folding enterprise, tweaking one of the tiny outside edges into the shape of a beak.
After what feels like a long time to Tim, standing there, Barry straightens up and pushes away from the table, his chin tipped back.
- I know what you need, Tim, says Barry, - that’s exactly why I’m here.
//
Tim’s forgotten a lot of things about Barry, he’s had to, but Zito’s way of slowing everything down to here, this, now, has stuck with Tim, so he’s neither surprised nor apprehensive when he recognizes that Zito’s not driving them back downtown to the team hotel across from the stadium. In fact, they seem to be on the way to the airport.
- So what, now I’m kidnapping you? he says to Barry, who’s driving with one hand, the fingers of his left hand drumming on the armrest.
Tim's worried. Zito’s starting tomorrow, they’ve got yard call at one, and it’s more than a game. There’s a championship at stake.
- The Westin’s out, Timmy, you know that, everybody’s there. And besides, Barry says, now stroking his fingers across his own unshaven cheek, - I want to be somewhere different. Where everyone’s coming and going and they don’t give a shit who we are. If somebody’s knocking on the door, I want it to be room service.
- Are you saying you planned this? says Tim.
- All of this, what’s been happening, might look like disaster to you, says Zito, - but it’s out of our hands, and that’s the way it should be.
//
The Airport Marriott could be a hotel room anywhere in America, the furniture squeezed in a little too tight, the fake-wood armoire with a TV in it, the armchairs no one really sits in. Through the sheer curtains, the lights of the terminal and the loop road and the parking garage blink in colors, the green word D E P A R T U R E S burning steady in the smack middle of it all.
The habit of distance they’ve cultivated has made them polite. When the card clicks the door open, each tries to nod the other through it first, and finally Tim surges ahead, striding straight back to the chair in the far corner where he sits down, feet apart and both hands gripping the arms like the statue in the Lincoln Memorial.
Zito settles himself on the farthest-away corner of one of the beds, his back straight, the light from the big window gleaming soft on the edges of his face. This season he’s taken to not shaving in the days before a start, which makes him look haggard, weird, down-and-out. Zito has this idea that the stubble and the shaggy mane make him look scarier on the mound, and he’s right.
Only old lovers can sit like this so long apart in the dark, without moving, past needing something to say. But after a long time the silence begins to harden and change into something strange, so Zito rises and walks slowly over to where Tim’s sitting and stretches out his right hand, the one he uses for everything but pitching. He tugs Tim up to his feet till they’re face to face, close enough to feel the scent and heat of each other’s skin, close enough for anything. Except that only their hands are touching.
Without letting go of Tim’s left hand, Zito lifts his own left hand until it’s level with Tim’s eyes, and then, gently, he uses the backs of his fingers to stroke the smooth angle of Tim’s face along his cheekbone. Tim doesn’t move, doesn’t even seem to breathe out, but he doesn’t pull away either, his eyes narrowing as they drill into Barry’s.
- I didn’t know this before, says Zito softly, as his hand comes to rest, pushing a stray lock of Tim’s hair back behind his ear, - but how I feel about you hasn’t changed, and this year. . . This fucked-up year, I think I’ve loved you more, what you’ve been through.
Tim explodes a breath, a hiss of contempt, through his teeth, and he pulls away, back against the wall, his arms and ankles crossing reflexively.
- You like the smell of failure, Barry? That what turns you on?
Zito takes his own step back and sighs, a sound so quiet that it gets swallowed up in the roar of a plane letting down its landing gear over their heads.
- It might look like failure to you, says Zito, - you’ve spent your life striking guys out without even really having to work at it.
- Wait, no -
Barry grabs Tim by the wrists as the younger man tries to break away for the door, and then he pulls Tim around roughly to face him. In the half-light Zito can see that Lincecum’s face is compressed with rage, and his eyes gleam with tears.
- Listen to me, Timmy. I’m only gonna say this once. This year, this thing you’ve been going through - it’s the fucking town the rest of us have lived in all our lives. Look around you. You look around lately? There’s a lot of guys around you been broken and tossed out and broken again. Vogey - he’s been kicked off every team that ever took him. Scoots, Huffy, Andres? Freddy? Nate? Theriot? You been walking in our shoes this year, Timmy, and it’s changing you, but what you can’t see is where that goes.
- And you can? says Lincecum belligerently.
Zito lets go his grip on Tim’s arms, and Lincecum steps back, rubbing his forearms as though he’s been shackled.
- I’m just another one of the bozos on the bus, says Zito wearily, - I got nothing on you, and you know it.
Barry uses his thumb and forefinger to crimp the skin between his eyebrows, and then he grinds a knuckle in the socket of his left eye. It feels good, and he can feel a headache coming, so he’s reached up both hands to massage his temples when he feels Tim’s hands, cool and slippery, cover his own and push them back through Barry’s hair, Tim’s long-for-pitching fingernails harsh and sweet against his skin.
When their mouths meet, their lips touching more slowly and tentatively than either of them can comprehend, the slow circling back begins, what’s known and what’s new tangled up into a knot they have this night to tease apart.
//
The ghosts of their other lovers hover over them in the dark tonight, and in a way that’s different from before, when Danny and Brandon and all the others were just spare parts of a broken past that was beyond fixing. Now, as Tim slides his hand under Barry’s shirt to slip it off his shoulder, he can’t help thinking about Barry’s wife Amber, her hands and her skin and the smell of her hair, and wondering how she touches him and how he wants her to do it. He lets his hands puzzle over the buttons, the zipper on the fly of Barry’s jeans, the buckle on his wristwatch; the palms of his hands only skim over the fine down of hair on Barry’s chest and legs and forearms. Closing his eyes, he strokes the side of his face against Barry’s bare chest, his own nipples hardening as his tongue goes to work on Barry’s.
For Tim, all thinking stops as Barry slowly, carefully lays him back against the banked-up pillows and slides his tongue along the long line of Tim’s throat. He presses his chest against Tim’s for a single breath they take together, and then another. Tim, so long accustomed to being in control, feels himself slip easily into Barry’s hands, giving himself up with little more than a sigh and a long breath of his lover’s scent. When ZIto’s unshaven jaw skates across Lincecum’s smooth chest and belly, bracing and foreign as sand, Tim flushes with pleasure at this rough edge he’s never felt in Zito before.
For a while Tim feels like he’s floating, warm at first and then cold with sweat and the whole time his skin lighting up all over whenever Zito’s mouth touches it. After a piece of time that can’t be measured, he’s got his hands in Zito’s long hair, pulling, his legs stretched almost painfully and his back arching up as Barry takes him in his mouth, tongue and lips and teeth. Tim can feel the waves of sound vibrating from Barry’s throat into his hard cock, and the back of Zito’s throat, urging him on, when Zito stops.
He props himself on his elbows and looks up at Tim through a haze of dark hair, his eyes huge in the faint light from the window.
- I can’t not, he says haltingly, wiping his mouth on the back of his wrist, - I can’t not make love to you.
Tim’s eyes, right on Zito’s in the darkness, are enough.
//
When Tim wakes he’s confused, disoriented, but when he rolls back over on his side ZIto’s there, already awake and lying on his side looking at Tim, his eyes red with lack of sleep and a huge smile on his face.
- I like that you’re watching me sleep, says Tim, yawning, and then he slowly works up a grin.
- You don’t even know, says Zito, - you don’t even know.
All Tim has to do is close his eyes, and Zito’s tongue is in his mouth, and they’re back in it.
//
Later that day, Zito’s first-ever postseason start turns out to be the game of his life.
The pitcher who was left off the 2010 postseason roster blows the series wide back open, throwing nearly eight innings of shutout ball, flummoxing the Cardinals with his 87-mph fastball and that unhittable curve that everyone remembers with longing from his Oakland days. The crowd at Busch stadium, which begins the night brandishing brooms along with their white rally rags, falls almost entirely silent after their pitcher Lance Lynn makes a bad throw to second and the Giants capitalize on it, scoring four.
As Bochy walks out to claim the ball late in the seventh, Crawford and Sandoval and Scutaro and Posey crowd the mound, circling Zito, slapping him in the chest, pride and relief and hope manifest on their faces.
And when the team sprints and cartwheels over the dugout lip out onto the field, ecstatic and surging with a new faith in themselves, the hardest hug is from Tim, his eyes exhausted and happy, pierced with a different light.