“…”
“My wife got sick. I lost my job, and our insurance went with it. With no insurance, we couldn’t afford to keep her in medicine. Then”—if he was remorseful, it was buried in his frustration—“she died, ’cause I couldn’t get a job to pay for treatment. We were married twenty years. Twenty years! I lost everything trying to keep her with me and now she’s gone. I got nothing and nobody. I walk around, and everyone thinks I’m on the street ’cause I’m some crackhead or something. I live handout to handout, and you think you’re just gonna fix it all with your goddamn baseball card?” He stared right through me, his words stealing the noise out of life around us. Then he picked my card up and looked at it again. “Oh, you look real good underneath that jersey, don’t you? Not a care in the world.” Then he crumpled the card in his dirty hand, and tossed it at me. “You can keep your bullshit card.”
All I could muster was, “I’m sorry.”
“You can keep that too!”
I sat at the table, trying to escape his gaze.
“Can’t a man just get a meal here?” he bellowed. “I gotta get preached to before I can eat so I started comin’ late. Now, I gotta listen to your bullshit about how great your life is?”
I fumbled in my pocket and pulled out his meal ticket as ordered. As I plucked it free, the entirety of my pocket’s contents poured forth. Baseball cards and meal tickets splattered on the floor. Cards, worthless cards, with glossy pictures of an inconsequential idiot littered the space at our feet along with precious meal tickets written with a ballpoint pen on nothing more than shards of scrap printer paper.
I bent down on one knee and picked up the mess as fast as I could. The ragged man watched me labor at his feet. He wore black workman’s boots that were falling apart. One boot had duct tape wrapped around it and both soles looked like blown-out tire treads.
“Looks like those shoes have had it?” My voice was back to normal. I must have found my natural tone somewhere in the mess on the floor.
The ragged man kicked out one shoe. “These pieces of shit? Bought ’em at the Super Walmart just a month ago. One month! They’s already fallin’ apart.”
“Why didn’t you take them back?”
“Won’t let me. Didn’t believe me, and I didn’t keep the receipt neither—I finally got enough money to buy me some decent shoes and this is what I got.” He mumbled curses, looking down at his feet.
This time of year in Ohio, the cold weather turns from snow to rain almost every other day. The ragged man’s feet had to be wet; there was no way, with so many standing puddles of slush-filled water, he was keeping his feet dry.
I looked to my feet. I was wearing Bass Company boots, fancy leather workman’s boots but not for working—they were too dressy. I got them a few years back with some extra Christmas money and kept them in fine condition, only wearing them when the weather necessitated.
“What size are your boots?” I asked.
“They’re a ten.”
It was in my brain. Something was pulling at me. Maybe it was always there, and I just did my best to tune it out. My mouth started talking, “You wanna switch?”
“What?”
“I’m asking you if you wanna swap shoes?”
The ragged man frowned at me as if I were playing a cruel joke. Then as if this was a bet he couldn’t afford not to take, he wiped his face, tugged his matted beard, and said, “I’ll switch, but you’re the one getting the raw end of the deal here, pal.”
“I’ll be alright.”
“Okay then,” he said, and he wasted no time kicking off his mangled boots. I unlaced mine, slipped them off, grabbed the pair together gently above the tongue, and handed them to him. He kicked his across the floor to me to complete the trade. He placed my boots on his feet and tied them up.
“How do they fit you?”
“Real good, these are real good, and”—he took some steps—“fit perfect, like they was made for me.” Reaching down, he pressed the tip of the boot to indicate where his toe snugly stopped. Then he almost began to smile, but stopped himself and eyed me with suspicion.
“Enjoy man. They’re all yours.”
His eyes and face changed, almost softening. The wildness left his countenance. He seemed like a person, like a man, a broken one but no longer disconnected. As cracked and cold as it was, his face began to warm. Maybe it was the way I viewed him now, maybe he was always that way.
“Thank you,” he said, in voice of the most genuine appreciation I’d ever heard. “This is a great kindness you’re doing.” The rough grains of his voice had smoothed out, and for a second I thought he might tear up. Instead of speaking, he reached out a dirty hand. Without hesitation, I took his hand in mine, and we shook.
“Thank you,” I said, stunned by it all. I gave him his meal ticket, and out of my life he walked in his dry, new boots, enroute to a chicken noodle meal that was mmm-mmm good.
Having nothing else to wear, I put on the ragged man’s old boots. They were, as I expected, soaked through. The damp soles discharged icy water into my socks on contact, and I almost tripped when the blown-out soles caught the corner of the steps. Wet, cold, blown apart, those boots were the best shoes I’d ever worn.
I didn’t know that man in rags, and he didn’t know me, but we knew how to treat each other because of the clothes we wore. Yet, something deeper than stained rags, dirty hands, glossy pictures, and clean uniforms took place between us. In that moment, both awkward and perfect, something happened I didn’t quite understand. For a moment the burden of baseball left my shoulders, and I wasn’t a player to be labeled. Though I didn’t understand it all right there, I knew my life in the game was going to change.
Chapter Five
My grandma didn’t exactly come to see me off as much as she came to stare eerily at me one last time for good luck. She lurked by the open garage door, safe from the harmful rays of direct sunlight, watching me like some carrion bird, as if I might take a dump in her yard. I threw my big suitcase and my Padres-issued equipment bag in the back of the cab and smacked the top of the trunk signaling I was ready to go. Then, despite myself, I managed to play good grandson long enough to hug my grandma even though the risk of being bitten on the neck was considerable.
At the airport check-in counter, I was informed that my bags were both overweight by about ten pounds. It’s hard to pack six months of stuff in one suitcase and an equipment bag. As I forked out one hundred dollars for the overages, I promised myself I’d ship my stuff next year. Then I recalled, I’d promised myself I’d do that last year.
Airplanes can be depressing, especially when you wind up with a middle seat between two chubby businessmen. When I boarded they followed me in, squeezing into the seats on the left and right of me and forcing me into that awkward game of chess involving armrest space. If this were a team flight, my compatriots and I would be smacking each other on the back of the head by now, ringing call buttons, annoying the stewardesses, and generally making asses of ourselves. There is safety in team numbers, a confidence not present when you’re alone. As it was, I pretended I was a mime, and flipped open SkyMall magazine while the business brothers broke out their BlackBerrys.
While I marveled over SkyMall’s life-changing ingenuity, the brothers sparked up a conversation, speaking through me as if I were invisible, rambling on about widget sales and gross national product or something. Suddenly excited, they hit on some bar they knew in the area they were headed to and how they were going to get ripped, how there was a dancer there, and how if their wives knew about all of it, they’d be in the doghouse—again. They laughed very mischievously, like the Dukes of Hazzard business edition, and might have shared high fives if my head