part 2

There were monumental adjustments to be made, but it was summer and he had several weeks to start making them before he was dumped into regular confinement with 1800 teenagers.

He did the best he could to reassure his parents, utterly bewildered by the stranger who had taken possession of their son, but they found consolation instead in the minister who encouraged them to embrace God’s miracle. Were they truly troubled by the fact their son was mature and industrious?

He found a summer job and used his first check to buy some used free weights. He built a bench and a power rack from scrap 2x4s and started lifting, running sprints and intervals, doing plyometrics. He ate lots of protein and stopped eating the candy and cookies and crap the other kids were living on.

He was just starting to see results when football practice started six weeks later, but he’d made a start and was already ahead of the kids who didn’t use the school’s ancient universal machine. He hadn’t played football the first time around but decided he wanted to throw something in the fall, and became a quarterback.

He returned to high school a middle aged sophomore. He made the best of it, which meant spending as much time with adults other than his parents as he could and working hard at everything. He went from an indifferent student to an excellent student, and when he realized how much he could coast, merely a good student.

Things improved. It was clear he was different, but over the course of the year his image evolved from freak to stud. He gained respect from teachers in the classroom and from students on the field.

He considered basketball in the winter, but concentrated instead on preparations for baseball. It paid off. By the end of the season he’d worked himself into the varsity rotation and everyone knew he was going to be a star.

He was acutely aware it was all profoundly unfair, and this insight yielded a humility that also made him easy to like, on top of everything else. He heard the word “mature” a lot. No shit, I’m forty-two years old. There was no one he could tell.

His biggest problem was girls. They were interested, he wasn’t. He knew middle-aged men were typically obsessed with teen-aged pussy but he had never been one of them. He did some dating, but communication was strained and his first sexual episode left him feeling like a pedophile.

During his junior year he found a quiet, serious college girl who was willing to be seen in public with a high school kid, but she was always smoking dope and he got tired of her stoner friends.
Eventually he did something he knew was a calculated risk.

He hooked up with his English teacher.

She was 34 and not bad looking with no husband and no children. She wanted both and knew he would provide neither, so it proved a strategic alliance for them both. There was no obsession on either part which left room for the wisdom to carry out their clandestine liason without inviting scrutiny.

She lived in a large apartment complex with an inside door which he was careful never to be observed entering. On a few occasions he was seen leaving, but as far as they both were aware, never did his visits arouse suspicion during the year and a half in which they occurred.

It was a nearly perfect arrangement. They were compatible enough to sustain both passion and conversation, but not on a continuous basis, so the time apart let their anticipation build for each encounter and left little to argue over.

From time to time she would take a break from their routine to sample legitimate candidates for the position of Mr English Teacher, and he always had mixed feelings when they proved unsuitable. But he was always glad to see her again and she would thank him for his return, maintaining that their relationship helped keep her from ruining her life by acting out of desperation.

He also dated, but not often and exclusively to keep up appearances at signature events like homecoming and prom. The one exception came in November of his senior year.

He watched it come upon him, day after day after day, his anxiety mounting, until he was a wreck. The waiting gave birth to complex and desperate excuses not to go, but in the end he knew he couldn’t take the chance it might affect what was to come. His son’s life might hang in the balance, so on that dismal winter evening, he borrowed a car and sought her out. He had avoided her as much as possible until now, but he found her exactly where he had encountered her before, and once again she made herself available to him, this time with even more enthusiasm, naturally, he was a Senior and The Quarterback. In a different car in the same field, he responded as he was required and then went home and took a long, hot shower.

The rest of his senior year was everything he had dreamed it could be. He was second team all-conference at quarterback. The team adopted the strength and conditioning program he designed. He was top ten percent with B’s in Trig and Physics and accepted to both state colleges he applied to. He didn’t have a car or spending money, but he found he never wanted for rides or clothes or beer. And of course he had the best fastball in the state. The decision he had to make was between the athletic scholarship and the minor league contract offered by the White Sox.

Screw it, college could wait.

The organization learned he had no breaking ball and no location for it. Hitters could read his off speed pitches and even though his heat was good, it wasn’t good enough for every pitch. So they made a third baseman out of him and created a monster. Nothing could get past him and he had a laser to first. His hitting was so-so. It took two years of minor league ball to get this all sorted out. Then he got called up.

He opened people’s eyes with his defensive gifts and his gun. Some of those eyes eventually noticed that if you left the ball out over the plate, you probably wouldn’t see it again, but if you pitched him low and inside, he couldn’t put wood on anything. His average was acceptable for awhile, then dropped every week for nine weeks. When his hits went from one a game to one a week and stayed there, he was sent down and never came back up.

But he spent three months in the Majors and heard Ozzie tell him his glove and his arm were hall-of-fame.

The smartest people he knew told him it was time to quit the kid games and go back to school, but he continued to play minor league ball where he could get a hit often enough to stay in the game and his infield play took people’s breath away. He loved it, and for a few more years he got called to spring training where coaches did everything they could to help his bat. He proved hopeless with three different organizations.

He didn’t make a lot of money in baseball compared to the majors, but he made more than the people he knew who had been going to college all that time, and he knew enough to invest it. With one exception, his memory of the stock market was worthless so he made some sure-thing sports championship bets and spent the winnings on a cozy little house and a Corvette. The car was essentially his only extravagance and he wasn’t putting any of his cash up his nose so he still had some capital when he saw what he had been checking the NASDAQ every week to see.

He dumped every spare dime he made into MSFT just the way he knew six billion people would one day wish to their respective gods they had had the good sense to do, including the people who were telling him he needed an education.

Screw it, college could wait.

He knew if wasn’t fair, and he knew that barring his prescience they were right, but all he could do was throw cash at the NASDAQ with both hands and encourage everyone he knew to do the same. Some did, some didn’t, but he spent a lot of time over the next decade working on charming wisecrack rejoinders to the ubiquitous inquiry, “How the hell did you know?”

He knew. With his future financial success a lock, he worked hard on his hitting and kept the dream alive, but after a few more years it was clear his bat would never let him move up and he was feeling more and more conspicuous as the kids he was playing with got younger and younger.

When he hit thirty he started to feel guilty about taking a spot from somebody who might have a chance at the bigs and once the game made him feel bad instead of good he knew it was time to move on. He didn’t need the income any longer and it looked like a good time to take the advice he’d been hearing for twelve years and get an education.

Once again, the age difference turned out to be a distinct advantage. His maturity had several appealing dimensions. He’d been a professional athlete, was comparatively well travelled, had his own house, a hot car, and some discretionary income even though he was frugal. It often gave him the distinction of appearing to be a man among boys and this did not go unnoticed among faculty or coeds.

He entered with the expectation of becoming an engineer but a semester of math remediation and another of calculus and physics led him to the conclusion that he could do the work if he wanted, but there really wasn’t any reason to. He had learned to understand exponential growth and his stock portfolio was a powerful counterpoint to any argument that he needed a solid technical degree to be a financial success.

He switched to anthropology where he found a better gender balance among the students and no deltas or epsilons at all. He was very happy and often reflected he was living the best possible life. He had plenty of companionship although there was always one thing missing. But that was only a matter of time, and he knew exactly to the minute how much.

Four years later the time came. He needed four beers to steady the nerves that had been tested by several months of cognitive dissonance, then entered the bar with conviction if not enthusiasm.
They had never heard of her.

It took him three days to track her down. She was working in a similar place in a different suburb and he went in the place early so it wasn’t busy and sat at a small table the hostess told him was in her section. She came to take his order and recognized him immediately.

“Hey, Fastball, how are you doin’? Remember me?”

“Sure Kat, how could I forget? You look great.”

“Thanks, you too. What’ll you have?”

He ordered a beer and while she was gone he tried to compose himself. He’d been wound pretty tight since failing to find her where he expected her to be, but since he had managed to locate her he told himself everything was going to be fine.

She returned and set his drink down, then slipped into the chair across from him.

“Y’know, you lit a fire under me in high school that got me where I am today.”

“Oh, yeah?” He took a drink. There was something wrong, he could feel it. He kept telling himself he was just nervous, but it was the same sinking feeling he used to get when she would come home two hours late from her shift and tell him it was because she had to take the busboy home.

“Yeah. I went out with a guy just so he would take me to see you when you came through here with the Sox.”

“Was it worth it?”

“Sure, it was fun. The people in front of us kept talking about how hard you throw the ball.”

“I remember that game. I even got a hit. Top of the eighth, one out, I hit a fastball into the gap in right center.”

“You remember that?”

“I remember every hit I got in the majors. It’s easy, there weren’t many.”

“I don’t think I saw it. I was going to hang around after and see if I could get you to ask me out but you guys were winning so we left early.”

“But I brought you two lovebirds together. How’d it work out?”

“I thought I was going to marry him. For awhile anyway. Until he tried to kill me.”

“He tried to kill you?”

“Not intentionally, but he came pretty close anyway. He was drunk and we hit a parked car in this old piece of shit Camaro he had. No seat belts and no insurance. Who do you think walked away?”

“Sounds like he did.”

“He broke his wrist. I was in the hospital for six weeks.”

“Jeez. You OK?”

“Yeah, I guess. It took me a long time to recover though. He wasn’t much help but I met a guy in physical therapy who treated me better anyway. So I married him instead.”

“Really? Congratulations. You don’t have a ring?”

“Yeah, a nice one with a diamond. But it gets in the way when I’m working so I leave it home. You’re not married, are you.” It was a statement, not a question.

“Not yet. Still workin’ on it.”

“No need to be in a hurry. I’ll bet you have lots of girlfriends.”

“I don’t know. I guess. I’ve been pretty lucky.”

“If it feels good, do it.”

He ignored this. “So,” he could feel his heart pounding, “any kids?”

“Nah. Can't have 'em, thanks to Carl."

His heart began to pound. "What?"

"I had two bottles of vodka in a sack on my lap. My head went through the windshield and I didn't get a scratch but the bottles broke when my stomach hit the dashboard and tried to cut me in half. The doctors put my plumbing back together but I got an infection in the hospital and they had to take my baby makers out."

It took a moment for this fact to penetrate. His anxiety was already running high, but he was not prepared to hear anything with that conveyed this degree of finality.

“You had your ovaries removed?”

“Yeah, both of ‘em. My cervix too. Hey, it wasn’t my idea. It’s not too bad, I don’t have to screw around with periods or birth control, it’s really pretty convenient. I was getting hot flashes though, until I got some hormones for it. Did you know if you lose your ovaries you get instant menopause? It’s a pain in the ass, let me tell you. But the important thing is, all the other equipment works just fine.”

He looked across the room and noticed their reflection in the mirror behind the bar. He saw her stand up.

“I better get back to work. Do you need a menu or anything?”

He looked at her and his mind tried to return to the exchange. He didn’t answer.

“Are you OK? Rick?”

He shook his head. “Just something on my mind. I need to get going.”

“Get going? You’ve only been here ten minutes. You hardly touched your beer. Listen, I can switch shifts and get off at ten. You could come back or we could meet somewhere, have a drink and talk some more.”

“What about your husband?”

“He doesn’t need to know. Things aren’t that good between us. I guess I love him, but I’m not in love with him anymore. I get pretty lonely sometimes. We haven’t had sex in a year.”

“Is that what he would say?”

“What do you mean?”

“Never mind. I gotta go.” He stood up and opened his wallet.

She put her hand on his arm “Never mind that, this one’s on me.”

He tossed a five on the table. “No, I need to do it this way.” He turned to leave.

She picked up the bill. “Thanks Rick. Come back and see me.”