Chapter Eight Fran
Eight
Fran
Sore Losers
Fran knew that for lots of people, going home to their parents’ house made them revert into sullen and grouchy teenagers, but for Fran it was the opposite.
Well, almost the opposite, because instead of reverting into a sullen and grouchy teenager, she developed into a sullen and grouchy adult.
Some days, when her brothers were moaning about the unfairness of their jobs, her mother was sneaking around with her wine, and her father was silently glued to the television, she felt like the oldest woman in the world.
Colin’s company had a box at Fenway and so he had invited RJ to the Red Sox–Yankees game and the boys, even though they were not going, were beside themselves with excitement.
“Are you going to be on the jumbotron? Do they have free popcorn and pizza?” RJ had tried to downplay it, letting them know that while yes, there was free popcorn, most adults got a stomachache if they ate more than a bucket, and he wasn’t a huge fan of ballpark pizza, but the boys were still hysterical about the whole thing.
Fran took them to her parents’ to watch the game, helping her mom cook dinner and letting everyone eat in the living room so that the boys wouldn’t miss a moment.
Every time the camera panned the crowd Hale would scream that he’d seen RJ, insisting that the little red dot in the middle was Daddy’s red shirt.
“That’s not him,” London scolded his brother crossly.
“He’s in a box, and those are the bleachers. ”
Kon and Damien were even more riled up than usual, going on about what a streak the Red Sox had been on, how they had gone 22–8 for the month of August, and how the Yankees had been having trouble in the bullpen and their best hitter, Aaron Judge, was out with an injury.
“This is it, guys, this is it!” Kon kept yelling every time the Red Sox made an out.
“The fastest pitch in the world was one hundred and five miles per hour,” Hale informed them. “That’s faster than a cheetah. A cheetah can run seventy-five miles per hour.”
“A peregrine falcon is faster,” London told him smugly. “It’s the fastest animal in the world.”
“I KNOW THAT!” yelled Hale before Damien’s teenagers shushed him.
Fran had watched countless baseball games growing up, raised on the rivalry between the Red Sox and the Yankees.
She was astonished as an adult to visit New York and see people wearing Red Sox hats on the street, everyone minding their own business and letting them just carry on.
If you wore a Yankees hat anywhere in Greenhead you’d be harassed until you pulled it off your head, people around Boston hated the Yankees that much.
As Fran scraped the plates and loaded the dishwasher, she debated whether she’d let the boys stay for the whole game or take them home a bit early.
If they blew past their bedtime, they would be groggy the whole next day, but a Red Sox–Yankees game was a special occasion and even Fran was starting to feel sucked into the drama of it.
The score was mostly even until the seventh inning, when the Red Sox changed pitchers. The guy let in three runs in about twenty minutes and the mood in the room shifted. “What the fuck is that guy doing? He’s going to give Anthony Volpe a fucking meatball right down the middle?” Kon cursed.
“Hey!” Fran looked at him sharply. “Don’t swear in front of my kids.” Kon ignored her.
In the bottom of the seventh the Sox went scoreless and Damien went into the kitchen and came back with three beers, cracking them open and doling them out to his brother and father.
Fran couldn’t tell how drunk they were—her brothers acted like animals in any state of inebriation—but the vibe was getting decidedly ugly in the room.
When the Yankees loaded the bases in the top of the eighth, both Kon and Damien started screaming at the TV and Fran couldn’t take it anymore.
She grabbed her bag, her kids’ water bottles, and marched them out to the car as they complained and pouted about missing the end of the game.
“We can watch it at home, baby. Your uncles are just having a tantrum and we don’t need to be around for it.
” By the time they got home Hale was asleep in his car seat and London was happy to just study his Pokémon binder in bed and so Fran didn’t even bother looking at the final score.
When RJ came in after midnight, trying to pull back the blankets quietly, Fran rolled over and gave him a sleepy kiss.
“Did you have fun?”
“Yeah, I got on the jumbotron.”
“You did?” Fran laughed quietly.
“Don’t worry, Colin got it all on video.” RJ patted Fran’s hair sweetly and she snuggled up against him, glad that even though she lived with a total idiot, she’d picked a nice one.
The Greasy Pole
RJ had a deep and abiding devotion to buffoonery.
He loved a prank, a costume party, any occasion to pursue the spectacularly ridiculous.
He crawled with hundreds of grown men dressed as Santa Claus through the bars and pubs of Boston, he ran the Thanksgiving Turkey Trot with an actual uncooked turkey in his arms, and over the years Fran had seen him compete in more hot dog and pie-eating contests than she could count.
In the early days of their relationship, when they were in their twenties and falling in love, Fran was charmed by his relentless pursuit of goofiness.
She thought it was fun. But these days, Fran was starting to wonder if it might be a little excessive.
This summer RJ had become obsessed with Gloucester’s Greasy Pole.
Fran had grown up watching it every year.
It was part of the Fiesta, the annual celebration of St. Peter that began among the Sicilian community.
It originated as a celebration of the fishing season, a moment of gratitude for the fishermen who came home again in a time when a hundred boys a year died on the boats.
Over time it had become a community homecoming, complete with a carnival, three days of live music, and hundreds of people pretending it was legal to wander through the streets drinking Pbr from the can.
As kids, Fran and her brothers went every summer, riding the Tilt-A-Whirl until they could barely stand, eating deep-fried Snickers and fluorescent snow cones.
As they got older, they went to the parties, they snuck beers in the pockets of their hoodies, and they joined the throngs of people on the beach screaming and cheering for the Greasy Pole.
The Greasy Pole was a forty-foot post perched like a diving board off a platform on the corner edge of Gloucester’s outer harbor.
Back in the day they would cover the pole in motor oil and axle grease to make it slippery, but now they used Crisco, fourteen cans of it, to make the pole slick with goo.
There was an Italian flag at the end, and the goal was to run the length and snatch the flag before falling twenty feet into the sea.
There were people on Jet Skis ready to help haul you out, Coast Guard and EMTs, because inevitably, men didn’t fall cleanly into the water.
They bounced their faces off the pole, splitting their lips and losing teeth, they knocked their backs, their wrists, their groins.
Women could participate, sure, but Fran had never once seen one try.
It seemed to be a uniquely male desire to publicly wreck yourself for the prize of bragging rights.
Of course, when someone managed to get the flag, the crowd lost their ever-loving minds.
They would swim out to the guy with the flag, nearly drowning him in the process.
They’d haul him to shore and lift him on their shoulders.
They’d carry him through the streets screaming “Viva San Pietro” and make him their king.
His name would be engraved in brass on the wall, his photo in the paper.
Still, none of Fran’s Greenhead friends had ever thought about signing up for the Greasy Pole.
It was more a Gloucester thing than a Greenhead thing, and Gloucester was an insular community.
They liked to say that in Gloucester your family tree was shaped like a wreath, that if you stuck around, you ran the very real risk of marrying your cousin.
But RJ had a bunch of friends from Gloucester on his crew, a stonemason, an electrician he hired regularly, and they’d become close.
When they removed a portico column after a demo out on Linebrook Road, RJ had brought it home and decided he was going to keep the column in their backyard and train to do the Greasy Pole himself.
He laid it across a tarp and he and the guys covered the thing in dish soap and took turns trying to run across it.
They were terrible. Hale and London were excited at first, spending hours in the yard with RJ slipping and sliding onto the grass, but they grew bored after realizing there was no way Fran would let them sign up for the real contest. The thing was, Fran didn’t actually think RJ would make it onto the list. She figured the sign-ups were mostly reserved for long-time competitors or their cousins and nephews.
And RJ couldn’t even make it across the dish soap column, so he had no chance of crossing the real thing.
But Fran had forgotten about the costumes.
For a reason nobody could quite explain, it had become traditional for Greasy Pole contestants to dress up, wearing skirts, wigs, superhero capes, or face paint.
And if there was one thing RJ couldn’t resist, it was the chance to make an ass of himself in a costume.
He went to St. Peter’s Church the Wednesday before Fiesta and signed up at the card table in the foyer.
His electrician, a man who must have had a legal name but who everyone referred to as “Sauce,” had a word with someone, and to Fran’s shock and chagrin, RJ made the cut.