SUMMER SPORTS CLASSIC II

What Happened in the Press Box?

Was it summer? Was it love?

Photo by Raphael on Unsplash

It had to have happened in the summer I turned seventeen, because I was still that naive, that inexperienced as to what a gesture, a look, and a comforting hand might mean. Sometimes when you’re obsessing about one person, you can’t see the other, and even if you did, you wouldn’t believe it, believe her, believe that she could be doing what she appeared to be doing.

Because my baseball playing days had ended in Pony League — at my last ever at bat, I hit a home run over the left-centerfield fence, and no one could believe it, but I still swear that it happened — I kept to the stands as I watched former teammates and good friends compete in the high school-ish Babe Ruth League on our local park’s biggest diamond.

As a kid, I had dreamed of playing on this field, but my inability to hit a fast ball, or a curve, with any semblance of regularity crushed those dreams (that home run I mentioned above was not just the only home run I hit in Little League, but it was also the ONLY hit I got that entire season when I was fourteen).

I wasn’t embarrassed to be seen at the ballpark despite my lack of prowess at the plate (but I was a stud in left field, once catching a fly and throwing out the runner tagging from third). I was a diamond bum — on the scene every night — some bright official decided I could just as easily run the scoreboard as sit like a stone amidst all the pretty teen baseball widows of our high school. A nice setup, except for the hours of isolation in that box each night.

Isolation broken occasionally by my friend Jim, who sometimes manned the mike, and then, sometimes by Suzie.

How do I tell you about Suzie?

I’d rather tell you about the girl who didn’t like me — didn’t like me like I liked her. Melissa. She had dyed orange hair; she had a cackling laugh; she would shout out randomly in class, saying outlandish things to distract our teachers, especially Miss Burns, a spinster science teacher who’d get lost in her own ramblings about food products with artificial dyes in them. Hot dogs, we discovered, are red for a reason.

But Melissa was truly one of the gorgeous high school girls — she was never without a boyfriend, and I desperately wanted to be one of these. I’d call her every night, but my calls, my close attention meant only friendship to her, something I didn’t want to see. When you’re sixteen or seventeen, you don’t have to see what’s in front of you, what’s clear to everyone else.

The one fortunate thing about my experience with Melissa was that she never uttered the obscenity:

“We’re too good of friends to actually date.”

Whew.

What’s also not so clear is that sometimes others do notice you, who have their own desires, though some of us, especially me, can’t comprehend how anyone who is, say, twenty-two, could desire anyone who is, say, seventeen.

Suzie was the twenty-two year old; she was also the student teacher in my high school algebra class.

She was also Melissa’s sister.

I think Suzie liked me and maybe understood what I was going through with Melissa. She’d spend extra time at my desk helping me understand the nature of equations with more than one variable. She smiled warmly at me every day in class. She once commented to Melissa, as Melissa related to me later, that on the day of our choir performance, she thought I looked “handsome” in my coat and tie.

“I think he’s really good looking,” Melissa told me Suzie said.

My first thought: If only you thought that, Melissa.

My second thought: actually, I didn’t have one because the idea that someone as old as Suzie could find someone as young as me handsome was about the same as when one of my grandmother’s peers would tell me that I was “cute” and “well-mannered.”

I should have known that the world I thought I knew, the one where people like and are attracted to age-appropriate others, wasn’t the only world. My best friend, for instance, had been the victim of an older woman when he was fifteen and she was twenty-one. It’s odd, but it happened, and like that baseball rarity of rarities, a triple play, that it could happen twice in one game, twice within one friend group where the victims still hadn’t reached the age of independence seemed impossible.

And yet…

I’m minding my own business, running the scoreboard. The Blue Sox are playing the Indians, and a friend of mine is pitching a perfect game through four innings. Jim, the guy in the booth with me, has gone out for a hot dog, and I do something I shouldn’t do. I hold the mike and hit the button to change the strike count. I don’t know how or why because I didn’t take physics, but I get a shock like I’ve never had before.

I pause for several breaths and wonder how close I was to electric shock death. I’m still breathing, my heart is slowing back to a normal beat, but my right leg aches. I guess the shock ended there, but this ache feels a bit like a cramp that has gripped me and then released, leaving the impression that both it and I need to consider electrodynamics or whatnot to do when left alone in the press box.

But I wasn’t left alone to consider such self-admonishments for long.

The press box itself was the size of a family room, so there was space, but only two chairs, and before I’d gotten over the first jolt, Suzie walked in, smiling. She took the seat next to me and began talking as if we were old friends.

Why she decided to come to this game, since no one kin to her was playing, didn’t occur to me back then. Maybe she heard Melissa talking about it and decided it would be a good way to kill a summer’s night. It couldn’t have been because she knew or hoped I’d be there, right?

I no longer remember what we talked about, and maybe I never knew because Suzie’s dark eyes and smile were enough to make a boy like me forget where he lived and that the innings were passing without a score update.

At some point, I mentioned my leg and the electrical surge, and I swear I had no ill intent, no ulterior motive, and wouldn’t have ever thought Suzie would do what she did.

What could it mean? What would you have thought if you were seventeen and a twenty-two-year-old, beautiful woman began rubbing the inside of your leg?

I’m sure I embarrassed myself because while my leg felt increasingly better, another part of me was becoming quite disturbed.

Did Suzie notice?

Did she care?

Did she continue rubbing, higher and deeper?

At some point in this journey, Jim returned to the booth, and Suzie politely stopped what she was doing and said goodbye. I had no idea what had happened — or rather, I knew but couldn’t believe it, and though Jim asked me if anything was wrong, I said:

“No, everything’s OK.”

Except, it wasn’t. Or at least it wasn’t in my head.

Suzie couldn’t have wanted more, right? She wouldn’t have wanted to take a ride with me and maybe end up in the parking lot behind the Jehovah’s Witness lodge, which was a wonderfully obscure and hidden place to find out how you felt about the other person, right?

She was a legal adult, and I wasn’t. And maybe this was nothing more than a response, an impulse, something innocent. At the time, I just didn’t think that she meant anything other than being a good, but older friend — a friend who liked me and liked to hang out with me when she could.

Oh. Wait.

Because there were other nights when summer loving had me a blast. Suzie showed up on those nights and always sat by me. We’d talk and laugh, and the game wouldn’t matter even if it was supposed to. As I look back on that summer, I realize that had I been a different person, had I been less naive or more forward, something might have happened beyond the baseball field, beyond what I was ready for.

In any case, after that summer, I never saw or spoke with Suzie again. I know that I have a good memory and am often haunted by such scenes when I didn’t do what I wanted to do, or didn’t understand what I wanted to do.

But is it wrong of me that I hope, wherever she is, that Suzie remembers that summer, too?

Thanks to Beyond the Scoreboard and to Mike Butler for publishing.