Curse of the Bambino
Jacob Aiello
Whoever is calling us should not be calling us. No one has our number. “Did you give our number to one of your friends?” asks my dad, as if he even has to ask. If I had any friends I would never give them this number. We’re watching a baseball game, my dad and I, my stepmother on the periphery of the living room doing what we’re afraid to ask, and then the telephone rings and then my stepmother announces to the room that she’ll be taking the call in the bathroom. We have a rotary phone in the bathroom hanging on the wall next to the bird cages. The phone is yellow, the birds are green. We have too many phones for no one to have our number, but someone has my stepmother’s number. The cord to the phone in the bathroom is longer than it has any reason being.
Inextricable from baseball are the curses. The Chicago Cubs’ Curse of the Billy Goat. The Curse of Coogan’s Bluff. The Boston Red Sox’ Curse of the Bambino, so named after the Red Sox traded Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees in 1920 for $125,000. During the 1986 World Series, the Red Sox are one out away from clinching the championship and breaking the curse when Mookie Wilson hits an easy ground ball that dribbles between the legs of Red Sox first baseman Bill Buckner. The Mets score and win the game. The next day they win the series.
“Billy Buckner,” my dad chirps when he’s reminded of him. “Poor Billy Buckner.” He’s tickled by the misfortunes of Billy Buckner, who’s become the target of national derision, whose name is now as synonymous with blunder as Merkle’s boner and Snodgrass’ muff. It’s not because my dad is a Mets fan. Bill Buckner’s path to World Series ignominy began in nearby Vallejo, where as a sophomore in high school my stepmother used to go visit her cousin, where every day after school they’d drive real slow by Billy Buckner’s house hoping to get a look at him taking out the garbage, maybe washing his car. My dad is tickled by how far her high school crush has fallen, how publicly.
With the exception of Billy Buckner, references to my stepmother’s past are otherwise avoided. We don’t acknowledge the ex-husband from Texas, or the house they lived in that caught fire. Only after she’s been drinking does my stepmother mention her years in Los Angeles, only when my dad has left the room. Once she was walking down Rodeo Drive and Rod Stewart drove by in his convertible and whistled at her, she tells me, sitting on the floor in the living room in a house down a dirt road in the mountains of Northern California. She still has friends, she wants me to know. She still has options. ~
By the time she comes out of the bathroom, the baseball game is over. They’re just wrapping up the weather on the ten o’clock news: rain expected, possible thunderstorms. Years later I find out the toilet reservoir was one of her favorite hiding spots, but right now I think it’s the phone call that’s made her speech slurred, her steps so unsure, maybe that’s why the room tenses whenever the telephone rings. My dad doesn’t say anything immediately. He is like a batter at the plate, waiting for the pitch.
Did you know a baseball game can theoretically last forever? That it’s only limited by the pitcher’s ability to produce 27 outs? Watching baseball isn’t about witnessing acts of sportsmanship or athleticism. It’s about controlling the outcome via unblinking focus and willpower. There’s a good anxious feeling I was having watching the baseball game that then became a bad anxious feeling when the telephone rang, when I had to shift my attention to suspense less recreational.
I protect myself via a process of elimination. The telephone. The baseball game. There’s nothing I can do about the fighting unless they’re fighting about the conditions of our environment when the fighting began. The baseball game. When their fighting spills out onto the driveway I reach behind the hutch and unplug the phone cable from the wall. For a little while I think I’ve fixed it until the phone rings again in the bathroom. I forgot about the phone in the bathroom.
All the while I am screaming too. Losing myself like when a fan loses themselves at a baseball game, like when the batter hits a long ball and you involuntarily rise to cheer the ball’s arc in the night sky, screaming because everyone is screaming and cheering and against that overwhelming force of emotion it’s anything not to just get swallowed whole. If you watch close enough, a baseball game can be incredibly violent. The beating they give to that poor ball. ~
I start watching baseball again during the pandemic. It’s kind of a secret to everyone but my wife Amy, because none of my friends really like baseball. In some ways not liking things like baseball was one of the reasons we became friends. I have no favorite team. I’m reminded of how it used to enthrall me; the green grass, the
numbers, the amount of space an outfielder has to cover to catch a fly ball, how time dilates. Moments so tense I don’t realize my drink is melting a wet spot on my chest, and then multiple innings pass and I forget I’m even watching anything, playing games on my phone. Phones mean something different now too.
Teams play against each other in empty stadiums, and it’s so quiet a home run becomes just a ball over a fence, bouncing against the empty seats. When the pandemic begins Amy and I tell each other how lucky we are. That we still have our jobs. That we’ve just bought a house. How terrible it must be for children in a very specific scenario to be living through this, I keep thinking, stuck at home with their parents who are also stuck at home. Specifically me, I’m thinking about. Specifically my childhood scenario.
The Boston Red Sox’ Curse of the Bambino lasts for 86 years. In 2004 they come back from a 3-0 deficit to defeat the New York Yankees in seven games in the American League Championship Series, and then sweep the St. Louis Cardinals to win the World Series. Some curses are easier to break than others. I still get anxious when the telephone rings. I think I’m going to keep watching baseball. Amy and I are making plans to go see a game in person next year, maybe Seattle, maybe San Francisco or Oakland, whose colors are yellow and green.
I don’t really care if the seats are any good, I just want to be a member of a throng, screaming my voice hoarse. I want to drink a beer and eat a hot dog and shout at the umpire when he gets a call wrong. I want to participate as though experiencing it all for the first time. I want to catch a foul ball and inspect its stitching for evidence of impact, and in so doing see if it’s possible to disassemble the thing that brought me joy from the trauma that ruined it.