Clubbie: Two Seasons with Baseball's Broken Dreamers
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Old Dominion University ODU Digital Commons English Theses & Dissertations English Spring 2017 Clubbie: Two Seasons with Baseball's Broken Dreamers Gregory Scott Larson Old Dominion University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/english_etds Part of the Creative Writing Commons Recommended Citation Larson, Gregory S.. "Clubbie: Two Seasons with Baseball's Broken Dreamers" (2017). Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Thesis, English, Old Dominion University, DOI: 10.25777/fqsy-bn92 https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/english_etds/28 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the English at ODU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Theses & Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ODU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. CLUBBIE: TWO SEASONS WITH BASEBALL’S BROKEN DREAMERS by Gregory Scott Larson B.A. May 2011, Winthrop University A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Old Dominion University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF FINE ARTS CREATIVE WRITING OLD DOMINION UNIVERSITY May 2017 Approved by: Michael Pearson (Director) Joe Cosco (Member) Joe Jackson (Member) ABSTRACT CLUBBIE: TWO SEASONS WITH BASEBALL’S BROKEN DREAMERS Gregory Scott Larson Old Dominion, University, 2017 Director: Dr. Michael Pearson The main theme of this manuscript is disillusionment. In order for this theme to hit home, I needed the character called Greg Larson, along with the reader, and (for the most part) the narrator, to discover this world of minor league baseball at the same time. This would allow me to tease the illusion—to set up baseball as this grand nostalgic enterprise in the beginning in a way that all three of us could believe it (with the exception of some expository asides from the narrator). I could describe my character’s boyish relationship with baseball so that it naturally lent itself to future heartache. That way, all of us together—Greg Larson, the reader, and the narrator—could hop in my beat-down gold Cadillac Deville and drive up to Maryland to lose our youth together, for better and for worse. iii Copyright, 2017, by Gregory Scott Larson, All Rights Reserved. iv This thesis is dedicated to the thousands of minor league baseball players who never made it to the majors. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks to my thesis committee for spending their valuable time with my writing. Thanks to the many players and coaches who let me interview them. Thanks to my family and friends. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page A SHOOTING STAR ......................................................................................................................1 BRICK NUMBERS .......................................................................................................................29 EVEN THE JADED DREAM .......................................................................................................44 SHADOWBOXING ......................................................................................................................68 ON A TRAIN BOUND FOR NOWHERE ....................................................................................82 THE HOUSES THAT CAL BUILT ..............................................................................................89 VITA ............................................................................................................................................109 1 A SHOOTING STAR My 1997 Cadillac Deville looked glamorous from the outside. Its gold paint glistening in the Florida sun could have been the streak of a shooting star as it flashed across the blacktop of I- 75. I’d had the car since I was 17—just a high school junior hoping to get drafted into the major leagues. The Caddie was now 15 years old, but its hood ornament, the Cadillac wreath and crest, the symbol of luxury, still stood proudly at the tip of its bow. The ornament pointed north like a compass needle from Fort Myers, Florida, to Aberdeen, Maryland, home of the Aberdeen IronBirds. But shooting star is a misnomer. The streaks of light we see flashing across the night sky aren’t stars at all but space debris burning up in the atmosphere. It’s only our perception that makes them look like stars. That was the Cadillac: just a bit of space junk that happened to look pretty slicing across the blackness. In an effort to save money, I’d done away with the A/C compressor rather than repair it, so I had long since come to terms with the incessant sweating that fused my back to the cracked leather of my driver’s seat in the mid-summer heat of southwest Florida. The engine had developed this ominous clicking sound that was born deep inside its mysterious caverns. I nicknamed the sound the death rattles. I’d taught myself just enough about car repair to save me a few bucks, but not enough to, say, get all of the windows to roll down. The brakes were well past the squealing stage. The sound had evolved into a rumble that seemed to come from some place deep inside the earth and some time millions of years in the past. The Caddie got me from point A to point B, more or less, but I’d be lucky to make it up to Maryland without spontaneously combusting into a pile of hot ash. Included in that flame would inevitably be my few possessions. Among them my baseball mitt—a tan Rawlings 11 ¾ inch Pro Preferred model that I’d had since high school—and a 2 blanket my mom had made me. The blanket had red backing and the blue front was peppered with Minnesota Twins logos. I had to make choices when I packed the car: it was big, no doubt, but not everything could come with me. I stood looking at that Twins blanket, wondering. My new boss, Jason, who I only knew through two phone conversations, said that the team was putting me up for free in an apartment between Baltimore and Aberdeen to its north. “Will I be in there alone?” I’d asked. “Probably not,” he’d said over the phone. “It’s a two-bedroom, so you’ll probably be put up with a couple of players.” I held the blanket, wondering if the IronBirds players, who were in the Baltimore Orioles organization, would look down on me for having a Twins blanket on my bed or wearing a Twins cap. “You work in the Orioles system now,” I imagined them saying, “get that Twins shit off your bed.” And I didn’t question Jason saying “a couple,” even though a couple plus me would make three people in two bedrooms. I didn’t mind much, though, since I would gladly sleep in the living room of a shared apartment rather than live one more day in a Florida golf community. Ever since I’d graduated in 2011, post-college life had not been what I expected. I was proud of my education from Winthrop University, a 6000-student Division I school in Rock Hill, South Carolina, but my English degree hadn’t done a damn thing for me other than romanticize my view of the future and dent my parents’ wallet by nearly six figures. Winthrop’s English building, Bancroft Hall, was a beautiful brick Neo-Georgian surrounded by oak trees. There was a poem written on the wall of the first floor girls’ bathroom, 3 just after you walked through the front doors and got pummeled with that nostalgic must like old books. The poem was Longfellow’s Psalm of Life. It starts: Tell me not, in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty dream! For the soul is dead that slumbers And things are not what they seem. Indeed, they weren’t. Winthrop had been a place of promise for me, but I had all but accepted life as an empty dream. My parents lived in one of those self-contained golf course communities that seemed to spawn fully formed out of the sulphurous bubbling muck that covers the state of Florida. My parents’ community was nice—with two golf courses and a pool just down the street—but it was no place for a 23-year-old to be spending his time. What scared me most was how comfortable I had gotten there. I made friends, even. Steve, the Vietnam vet who lived down the street, liked to tell me jokes about semen, rabbis, and loose women. He’d lean in close to see if I was laughing because the war ruined his hearing (“Aw, what d’you know about humor?” he’d say). Judge Bob Danforth, who was exactly 50 years my senior, lived across the street from Steve. Whenever Bob and I went golfing I had to act as his Seeing Eye dog because his cataracts were so bad he’d eat the sandwiches with the wrapper still on. Next to my parents’ place was Rick Kaplan, who was all slinged up with a broken arm after a fall on his bike. If I put all three of them together I might’ve had one complete friend. The heat was insufferable for a pale-skinned, blue-eyed Norwegian kid who grew up in Minnesota. A few moles had curdled on my skin and the dermatologist lopped them off as if he was picking chocolate chips off a cookie. 4 Two of my brothers also lived in Fort Myers and they offered me a job at their real estate school. I could help around the office making coffee, answering phones, checking in students, and doing a bit of marketing. I declined, telling them I wanted to focus on writing. I did indeed drive my Caddie into the library every weekday to write, but I wasn’t getting paid for it—writing hadn’t brought me any closer to escaping my parents’ condo. I didn’t say this to my brothers, but I think I was afraid of digging myself so deep into Fort Myers that I never left to chase my dreams. But at the time, my only dream was leaving Florida. When Jason first gave me a phone interview for the job with the IronBirds (as a clubhouse attendant), he said he wanted someone with experience.