15. More Sports With Balls
MORE SPORTS WITH BALLS
Connor
Sure you won’t play w/us Tuesday night? You could be the sub for the sub for right field
Guarantee you’d never get in
Well never get in the game!
Did you get it
Jonathan
No.
Connor
I meant you can get in me tho
Jonathan
Not if you continue to text jokes like that.
Connor
I could borrow a cute pair of tight pants for you and my spare jersey
Jonathan
Your team wears T-shirts, not jerseys.
Connor
Don’t ruin my Schitt’s Creek fantasy
Jonathan
While I enjoying being your fantasy, there is only one sport I play with balls.
Connor
BOCCE, OLD MAN?
Jonathan
No.
Connor
FFS not Cricket
Jonathan
No.
Connor
Pickleball? I play too
We could play together
Please
Jonathan
Although I do play table tennis, you know I was making a sexual innuendo.
Connor
Is it successful if you have to explain it tho? Is it
Jonathan
That’s a you-problem not a me-problem.
Connor
I don’t think so bud
And it’s ping pong unless your a nerd
You’re
Jonathan
I’m grateful we haven’t entered the phase where you neglect to correct even the most egregious errors.
Also I am an accomplished former world-class athlete, so you can neither bait me nor bribe me to participate in your David Rose softball role play request.
Connor
What if I promise bbq after
Jonathan
Still no.
What is the precise nature of the food?
Connor
Ha! I see what you did
This weeks a Tibetan momo food trunk
Track
Truck food tuck fuck
Jonathan knew this was the point where a person who wasn’t an uptight stick might reply with food or sex emojis, or both. This was the point where a somewhat normal person would agree to voluntarily attend an event at a sports field filled with strangers who understood and liked team sports.
Unfortunately for his social life, this was the point where his finger froze over the letters on the screen and his brain imitated a dry pan left on a stove burner.
Connor
You don’t have to take the field. You can sit in tour chair and keep the book.
I’ll teach you. Just come
That was not not innuendo
Jonathan
Fine.
But I won’t wear those polyester knee-type pants.
Ever.
Connor
Fine
But you will wear one of my jerseys
Jonathan
They are merely T-shirts. And they’re huge.
Connor
You can knot it at the waist
Jonathan
Why don’t I get a pair of scissors and cut the thing off?
Connor
And show your midwife!
My drift
Midrift
Fuck you know what I mean
Jonathan
No, I don’t think I do.
Connor
I meant that sexy part of your body that surrounds your cute lil belly button that I want to snack on. Your midriff
You can cut up my tshirt and show it off
Jonathan
Was I referring to the shirt?
On Tuesday, Jonathan went to Connor’s softball game.
He and Lily had concluded that the appropriate attire for this event was neither librarian casual nor shorts with a four-inch inseam, so instead he embraced dorky dad aesthetic.
Before he left work, he changed from his summer-weight gray wool and linen blend trousers into a pair of navy blue shorts long enough to only reveal a hint of his quadriceps.
Oddly placed tan lines were a risk he was willing to take for Connor.
He paired the navy shorts with a slim white polo, a bucket hat in quilted squares of blues and grays, and a cross-body water bottle carrier from his favorite K-Town home goods store.
Today’s charms on the strap buckle were a stack of books, a coffee mug, and a smiling apple.
Not that the collection was specifically meant to be for a teacher, but it wasn’t not inspired by the teacher he was here to see.
Then he had to do the thing he’d so carefully dressed for: drive to the park and walk into a sports facility alone. Sure, it was an outdoor public park, but it was still a place where jocks could throw basketballs at people’s backs and laugh about it when they stumbled.
That had only happened once, in middle school, before he switched to the athlete home school program, and it might have been an accident, but as a not-tall, not-white, not-straight person, he was always going to listen to the internal voice of distrust. Always.
Unfortunately, his personal warning system was a chatty bitch.
Nothing like that would happen tonight. Connor’s teammates would be like Connor; they would accept his funny hat and his water bottle charms.
Tonight Connor’s team, called Queers for Beers, played against the Swish Hitters, a thoroughly better team name but which Jonathan acknowledged was not as inclusive as the former.
Connor said his team was mostly lesbians and nonbinary people, a handful of gay men, and a few straight allies who played with them because it was allegedly less drama than the other teams in the league, but Jonathan couldn’t see that, because Connor had shown him the team Discord.
The refreshments schedule had sublists and a definitions page.Nothing with definitions could be less drama.
Trixie, who Jonathan remembered from the concert Saturday night, came out of the fenced cage that was filled with people and gear. Connor followed on her heels.
Jonathan’s brain belatedly supplied one of the words Lily had drilled into him. Dugout. That was a dugout.
“Good to see you again, Jonathan!” Even without the upright bass, Trixie was very large, and with her hands empty, she welcomed him with the type of handshake that comes with a bonus arm tap.
So even the women on the team, including one so incongruously named Trixie that he honestly had to assume it was the equivalent of a roller-derby name, were going to give him jock tests. Yay.
“Connor says you’re going to keep the book for us?”
“Did he?” Jonathan stared at Connor, who at least had the grace to blush with that combination of guilt and innocence that should not soften Jonathan’s spine; it should not, but it did. “I love being volunteered for new things.”
“Don’t we all.” Trixie laughed. “But seriously, my girlfriend Michelle records our stats online. The paper book is just a league formality. Don’t worry about it.
And thank you.” There was some baseball chatter—softball chatter?
—between Trixie and Connor, and Jonathan opted to ignore it and study the people milling about.
They were basically all looking at him but trying not to look, a ridiculous act that could have been lifted straight from a car crash scene.
As she started to walk away, Trixie turned back and said, “By the way, next time we can kit you out with a spare shirt.”
Connor’s face lit with triumph. “Yes!”
Jonathan tilted his head to indicate the man next to him. “Did he put you up to that?”
“No, why?” She looked back and forth between them. “Connor, dude, give him some space.”
“But why is it okay for you to offer him a shirt, and not for me? Why?”
Jonathan had never seen a man younger than sixty-five actually splutter, but he might be witnessing it now.
Trixie sighed. “Because I’m a team captain who is grateful to have a fan in the stands. You are a guy who has to learn to slow your roll and chill the fuck out. Remember what happened when you played for them?” She jerked her thumb toward the team across the dirt field.
Jonathan’s hat and sunglasses sufficiently shaded his eyes to permit examining the tight pants worn by the other team.
Navy and white pinstripe, no less. While he approved of that pattern, and there were perhaps a few Parisian sidewalk-sized street sweepers being displayed in the far dugout, there were no so-called dump trucks.
If Connor used to play for that team of pinstripe-wearing men, not the one of mostly-lesbians, Jonathan could guess what went down.
Connor, probably.
This conversation should perhaps exclude him, so he drifted three steps to the side to give the illusion that he couldn’t hear and wasn’t listening.
If he’d been born with the capabilities of a bat or a horse, he’d swivel his ears to listen to every word. Luckily, neither Connor nor Trixie were quiet people, so having sadly unidirectional ears didn’t hinder his eavesdropping.
“That was a one-time mistake. A misunderstanding about—”
“It was two of them! The Double Play Disaster!”
“It wasn’t at the same time!”
“On the same team!” Trixie could sound like she was yelling without raising her voice. Much.
“But Jonathan’s not—”
“Chill. Out.” At the edge of his peripheral vision, he saw Trixie give Connor the type of look that made him close his mouth and stomp toward the dugout.
Jonathan was learning a lot before the game even started. So far, it was a tie between useless things like baseball terms and potentially life-changing things like, “Connor is supposed to chill more” and “Connor is simultaneously the most loveable person I’ve ever met and an utter cockslut.”
Before the game began, Trixie’s partner handed him a spiral-bound notebook and a pencil and they chatted. It was reassuring.
He also saw Ribby lounging in a blanket nest, tied in the shade under the bleachers next to a water bowl.
They made eye contact, but Ribby wasn’t much into chat.
He lumbered to his feet, stretched, showed Jonathan his teeth, tongue, and throat in an admirable yawn, and then sauntered out to nudge Jonathan’s knee.
His dog nose was wet, or maybe the right word was damp, but at least it wasn’t slimy, so he didn’t have to wipe his skin.
People who liked dogs would pet the dog’s head now.
Trixie’s partner was looking, and Ribby was waiting. Jonathan set the book and pencil on the metal bleacher seat. Ribby couldn’t lick the top of his own skull, so Jonathan reached for that spot.
Ribby’s head was warm and covered with a velvet nap even shorter and softer than the nap of that vintage smoking jacket he’d wanted last year at the Brooklyn Flea but hadn’t bought.
Was velvet inspired by animal fur? Ribby wiggled more of his head across Jonathan’s knee, inserting his ears under Jonathan’s hand.
Jonathan could admit, at least to himself, that the dog’s ears were next-level soft. He understood why Connor constantly stroked Ribby’s head.
“Game’s starting.” Trixie’s partner said. “That’s Danny in the box. Should be on the list.”