It was a page from my book, and I jumped right in. “We could go to the game,” I told her. “The Gulls aren’t very good, but I’ve got an old classmate who’s coach, and the park organist is worth the price of admission.”
At this she smiled so that just the tips of her front teeth showed and stood on one leg so that her shape in those Levi’s cut a hard curve against the door behind her. I heard myself saying, “And the beer is cold and it’s not going to rain.” I explained that I didn’t have a car and gave her my address. As a rule I try not to view women as their parts, but—as I said—my moaning had been interrupted and the whole era had me in a hammerlock, and as Lynn turned, her backside involuntarily brought to mind a raw word from some corner of my youth: tail.
THAT NIGHT as I eased into her car I realized that this was the first time I had been in a car alone with a woman for four weeks. For a moment, nine or ten seconds, it actually felt like a date. Ten tops. Though I hadn’t accomplished anything with my life so far, I was showered and shined and the water in my hair was evaporating in a promising way, and we were going to the ball game.
I looked over at Lynn in her black silky skirt and plum sweater. She looked like a lot of women today: good. I couldn’t tell if this was the outfit of a woman in deep physical need or not. The outfit didn’t look overtly sexual, or maybe it did but so did everything else. And then I realized that in the muggy backwash late in this sour month, I felt the faint but unmistakable physical stir of desire. I’ve got to admit, it was a relief. I took it as a sign of well-being, possibly good health. It was a feeling that well-directed could get me somewhere.
As we arrived, turning onto Thirteenth South under the jutting cement bleachers of Derks Field, I smiled at myself for being so simple. I glanced again at Lynn’s wardrobe. You can’t tell a thing anymore by the way people dress; it only helps in court. No one dresses like a prostitute these days, not even the prostitutes. And besides, in my eight-year-old Sears khakis and blanched blue Oxford-cloth shirt from an era so far bygone only the Everly Brothers would have remembered it, I looked like the person in trouble, the person in deep, inarticulate need.
IN THE AMBIGUITY in which American ballparks exist, and they are a ragtag bunch, Derks Field is it. It is simply the loveliest garden of a small ballpark in the western United States. The stadium itself is primarily crumbling concrete poured the year I was born and named after John C. Derks, the sports editor at the Tribune who helped found the Pacific Coast League, Triple A Baseball, years ago. Though it could seat just over ten thousand, the average crowd these days was a scattered four hundred or so. This little Eden is situated, like most ballparks, in a kind of tough low-rent district spotted with small warehouses and storage yards for rusting heavy equipment.
As a boy I had come here and seen Dick Stuart play first base for the Bees; it was said he could hit the ball to Sugarhouse, which was about six miles into deep center. And my college team had played several games here my senior year while the campus field was being moved from behind the Medical School to Fort Douglas, and I mean Derks was a field that made you just want to take a few slides in the rich clay, dive for a liner in the lush grass.
Lynn and I parked in the back of the nearby All-Oil gas station and walked through a moderately threatening bevy of ten-year-old street kids milling outside the ticket office. When the game started, they would fan out across the street and wait to fight over foul balls, worth a buck apiece at the gate.
I love the moment of emerging into a baseball stadium, seeing all the new distance across the expanse of green grass made magical by the field lights bright in the incipient twilight. The bright cartoon colors on the ads of the home-run fence make a little carnival of their own, and above the “401 Feet” sign in straight-away center, the purple mountains of the Wasatch Front strike the sky, holding their stashes of snow like pink secrets in the last daylight.
I felt right at home. There was Midgely, the only guy who stayed with baseball from our college squad, standing on the dugout steps just like a coach is supposed to look; there were all the teenage baseball wives sitting in the box behind the dugout, their blond hair buoyant in the fresh air, their babies struggling in the lap blankets; there was the empty box that our firm bought for the season and which no one ever used; there beyond first in the general admission were Benito Antenna’s fans, a grouping of eight or nine of the largest women in the state come to cheer their true love; and there riding the summer air like the aroma of peanuts and popcorn and cut grass were the strains of Steiner Brightenbeeker’s organ cutting a quirky and satanic version of “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” I could see the Phantom of the Ballpark himself pounding out the melody in his little green cell, way up at the top of the bleachers next to the press box.