Page 37 of Diamond Ring
Erase nothing.
He writes more. That he’s here, just as the Elephants team is returning from spring training, in an apartment he won’t need to pack up for at least a few weeks. That he’s here and not sent down to their triple-A team, which is now located in Nashville, because nothing in the game stays static. That he’s here, at all, back in Oakland, on the planet. And that he’s worried that this season will end like it did last time he was with the Elephants: in abject and very public failure. With him getting hurt again.
But he’s here and Matt isn’t, though it feels sometimes like he is, especially each December when Jake lights a yahrzeit candle and watches the smoke dissolve into the night air. He’s here and Matt isn’t, so Jake’s going to be here today, and he’ll worry about tomorrow when it comes.
His previous agitation recedes. The coffeemaker beeps that it’s done. He pours a thermos mug and doses it with soy milk. He should eat. The meds nauseate him, something that the doctors said would wear off and hasn’t. Still, he has a bag of frozen bananas, a tub of peanut butter, another of protein powder. That, loosened with a few more splashes of soy milk, and he has breakfast. He cleans the blender, and alternates drinking his smoothie and his coffee, grateful that his stomach lining could be complaining more than it is.
He notes it in his journal, what he ate, what he’s drinking. How he’s feeling as he turns the rinsed-out blender over in the drying rack.Happy.Nervous. With some consideration:Hopeful. Because the beginning of the baseball season always functions on possibility, that this year will be his year. Even if for the past decade, since the last time he pitched in the big leagues, it hasn’t been.
Outside, it’s bright. He zips his thin jacket to his chin as he hustles across the parking lot to his truck. The Bay Area is cold even when it’s warm, no humidity like a blanket to wrap around him. Still he missed it, and the feeling of always being close to the water, and the food. He didn’t expect to be struck by so many memories. The city’s changed in the past decade. But he wasn’t prepared for all the things that stayed the same: the green of the Elephants jerseys, the comforting dysfunction of the Coliseum. It’s possible other things haven’t changed—he’s back on the roster, but so is Alex.Angelides. Whatever they’re calling one another. A nervousness Jake carries along with his cup of coffee toward his truck.
He cleaned it yesterday, and it still smells clean, like the spray that’s supposed to make it smell new, even if it’s not. His gas gauge reads three-quarters full; the engine turns over when he puts the key in the ignition. Mercifully little traffic stalls him on the way to the ballpark, and he’s grateful for that and for the time he gets to drink coffee and listen to morning radio shows when there’s a backup.
The team won’t be back from spring training until the afternoon. One of the benefits of having been a late signing—Jake didn’t have to go through six weeks of unpaid scrimmage games in Arizona.Late signing is just another term for stopgap. An ungenerous thought, too weighed with pessimism this early in the season, standing in a big-league clubhouse.
They renovated since he last played here, replacing the thin carpet and brightening the semi-yellowed paint that inhaled a bunch of cigarette smoke in the seventies. Maybe he could be something new. Or maybe he’s just slapped a coat of paint over his underlying issues.
Clubhouses should be noisy places, but it’s quiet as he deposits his valuables in the little locking safe at his temporary stall: wallet, keys, necklace, the last of which he unhooks and lays flat so the chain doesn’t tangle its balding velvet case. The oneAlexgot for him, and Jake’s not thinking about that, exactly, but he’s also grateful that he’s not writing about it in his journal either.
He’s interrupted re-neatening the chain by Martinez, who thumps him with a good-morning hug. They haven’t worked together since the last time Jake played for the Elephants. Unlike Jake, Martinez has barely aged, black hair slick under his hat. He carries himself with a cheerful vigor that belies that as the bullpen coach, he spends most of his time dealing with demanding, high-strung pitchers. Not that Jake is either of those.
“You’re smiling today, Fischer.”
“Just woke up on the right side of the bed.”
Martinez’s jovial expression transforms into one of a doctor delivering truly bad news. “Sorry to burst your good mood, but you gotta do your interview.”
Jake was looking forward to the silence of the treadmill, just his music and the sound of his own footsteps. “Interview?”
“Gordon didn’t say anything? He’s making a documentary about his last season.”
Jake smiles the kind of smile he hopes communicates that, no, John Gordon, Elephants legend and future Hall of Famer now in the final season of his storied twenty-year career, didnotmention that he was making a movie. “Didn’t come up when we talked.” He tries to keep his tone sunny and ends up somewhere closer to scorched.
“They want guys to do an initial something-or-other.” Martinez shrugs, as if it’s no big deal, because for him, it likely isn’t.
Jake’s eyes drift toward the clock. The team’ll be back in a few hours or so. Plenty of time for him to be cleared out of here. Or would have been. He tries to push down his unease. No one’s wanted to interview him for the past five years, the novelty ofJake Fischer, failed superstarhaving worn off, leaving onlyJake Fischer, wow, what ever happened to that guy?in its wake.
He used to like this. Used to enjoy smiling at the camera and saying whatever baseball clichés the interviewer demanded and getting a thump on the arm for his trouble. But he used to do a lot of things, including pitch in the big leagues. Something he’s back to like a bad habit.
Even a week after Gordon called him and told him the Oakland front office was looking for pitchers, it still doesn’t feel quite real. Some of that elation burst when Gordon mentioned casually, offhandedly—and after Jake already agreed to sign—that Jake isn’t the only former Elephants player returning. Thus, getting the hell out of the clubhouse before the team arrives, like twenty-four hours will make much of a difference.At least tomorrow I can pretend to be normal about this. Now he won’t even get that reprieve. His smile tightens. “Point me to ’em.”
“Appreciate it.” Martinez claps him on the arm—the left arm, the repaired elbow that flickers now, not with injury, but the memory of it. “Some guys can be real assholes about this stuff.”
The training room-turned-makeshift studio is crowded with a few chairs and a lot of equipment. It’s tough to avoid the inquisitive eye of the camera. Or the interviewer, a dark-haired woman who introduces herself as “Toni with anI.”
She’s only a few inches shorter than Jake, putting her near six feet, broad-shouldered, with an athletic glow and muscular forearms that extend from the sleeves of her rolled-up plaid shirt. Tattoos trace their way down her arms—the kind Jake could ask about, if only as a stalling tactic—including one of the interlocked Olympic rings at her wrist.
She notices him studying them. “Played a few years back.” Like being an Olympian is no big thing.
“What sport?” And fuck, Gordon could have told him about any of this because Toni gives him an indulgent smile.
“Softball. Played catcher.” Like Jake should have known that. Like there are highlight reels of her hitting or fielding the way there aren’t of him pitching anymore.
At least Toni is trying to put him at ease. She gives him a firm, all-business handshake, then invites Jake to sit in a chair beside her own. Like they’re just going to sit andchatas the camera watches them, as Jake’s grin turns to more and more of a dyspeptic grimace, the meds not yet settled in his belly.
She hands him a mic pack and offers to get him clipped. “I think I remember how to do this,” he says, and it sounds like a joke, so she laughs.
“You ready?” Toni asks after he’s mic’d up.
