At 9

1980


I’m nine years old and The Philadelphia Phillies are about to win The World Series. It’s Game 6, at Veterans Stadium. Sixty-five thousand screaming fans. I’m seated in the Picnic Area (which is exactly what it sounds like; several picnic tables arranged near the fence down the third base line), because my Aunt Marie got us in for free and we don’t have actual tickets; Marie knows the nice old guy who retrieves foul balls that roll down the left field line. We’ve been to at least fifty games during this great 1980 season, and haven’t had to buy a single ticket. The game is almost over. The stadium feels like it’s swaying. Obedient horses with cops atop them trot onto the field before the final out, the city anticipating the best, and the worst.

A skinny man with a handlebar mustache tries to run onto the field prematurely, the power of joy compels him, and the power of several tall cups of beer; he can hardly contain himself, and for his excitement he gets whacked hard by a cop wielding a baton. The anonymous fan’s fingers are bloodied and broken, pointing in impossible directions and dripping blood like something out of a gruesome drive-in movie, like a lost scene from Phantasm, but he’ll live. A fan through and through, he turns his attention back to the field and smiles, relishing the victory, ignoring the pain; it helps that the alcohol has dulled his senses. His fingers have just been broken, but still, the game is more important. The sudden, contained outbreak of violence distracts me from the game; I know what it’s like to have your hand smashed; I know what it feels like when the tiny bones shatter.

But at this moment, there’s nothing more important than my favorite team winning the Big Game. I have my glove, my hat, my jersey, my lifelong devotion. Then it happens. Swing and a miss. Tug McGraw jumps into Bob Boone’s awaiting arms. A perfectly respectable display of manly, heterosexual joy. It’s fine for men to embrace if there is some sort of ball involved. Victorious men can do whatever the fuck they want. The Phillies win and pandemonium erupts. Sixty-five thousand smiles. Orgasms without the mess. I’m nine and think life will always be this sweet. I’m not a very smart child. I’m nine and I think this one wonderful moment will make up for all the other shitty ones. And I’ve already had my share of shitty moments. Almost ten years of shit.

Aunt Marie squeezes me ‘til I’m nearly out of air, cigarette dangling from her painted lips. Marie: sports fans, chain-smoker, middle-aged unmarried woman carrying on a long-term affair with a married cop who’ll never leave his wife. Her cigarettes are always covered with a thick layer of cherry red lipstick, and the butt always ends up looking more like a crayon than a cigarette, like something a circus clown might try to smoke. If someone popped her in the mouth you wouldn’t even know she was bleeding. She spends more time coughing than not coughing, and I usually feel like my life is in jeopardy when she drives me anywhere (trekking across The Walk Whitman Bridge, Marie coughing up little bits of her insides, me covering my eyes, sure that at any moment the car is going to fall off the bridge, my window all the way down just in case I have to swim to the surface, in case I survive the fall). But because of tonight, because of this, I will love Marie forever. She’s given me a moment. A chance to be at a bar with friends twenty years from now and able to say, "I was there. Fuck you all, I was there." A chance to have all the grown men standing around me say, "You’re so lucky." Because, who knows? The Phillies might never win The World Series again. Unlike money and women and cars and dignity, a moment can never be stolen. This almost makes up for all the times she’s made me sit and watch "Hee Haw" with her on her tiny black & white television.

Marie tries to drive us back to Jersey after the game, but the cars are simply not moving, because there are no drivers. People are out of their vehicles, jumping up and down on the hoods, setting off firecrackers, guzzling beer, smokin’ weed right out in the open. It’s pandemonium, screams from every direction, but not at all scary. People are too happy to fight. I’ve hugged fifteen strangers since that final pitch, given a hundred high-fives. In Philadelphia tonight, we are one: black, white; rich, poor; woman, man; clown, mime; smoker, nonsmoker; cop, mangled-hand fan. We’re all just witnesses of the moment. I don’t make it home until three o’clock in the morning, and Mom says I don’t have to go to school tomorrow, which is actually today. The Pennsauken school system will just have to get by without me for a day.

Mom says, "You’re so wound up you won’t be able to fall asleep until the sun comes up. You need your sleep. Missing one day of school won’t hurt you. Are they teaching anything important this week?"

"Nah," I say, coming down on the side of long division’s unimportance in the grand scheme of life. Math in general, really. Anyway, what the hell did she think I was going to say? "Oh yes, Mother. Today’s lesson is of great importance. Without it, I fear my life will be irreparably damaged." Yeah, right.

"Okay, then, Ervin. You get tomorrow off. You’ve had a big night. I’m glad they won. Enjoy it."

"Thanks, Mom!" I say. I instantly forgive her for making me bleed the week before. No, she didn’t beat me. No child abuse here. I’d gotten a touch of the head lice—a common affliction in our white trash neighborhood—and my scalp needed a good scraping with that awful metal comb. Most of the time I don’t mind being poor, but the rampant head lice is a bitch. The cockroaches aren’t much fun, either. There’s no worse sound in the world than my mother’s voice when she’s checking my head and suddenly says, "There’s one! Shit! I see the little bastard," because I know my scalp will soon be bleeding.

I wake up with a smile, until I feel the wetness under my ass. For a second I wonder if it’s one of those cool wet dreams the older kids are always raving about, with the sex and naked girls and the kissing and the inserting, but I’m not that lucky, and no thoughts of naked women passed through my head while I slept. Wet dreams are cool. All boys have them. What I’ve done is much less socially acceptable. I’ve pissed the goddamn bed, but I don’t care, because the Phillies are World Champions. Surely this bed-wetting thing is only temporary. I just drank too many Cokes at the game, Mom assures me, saying it’s no big deal. It happens to everyone, I’m told. I’m somewhat embarrassed nonetheless. A glorious evening, a damp morning.

"I’m sorry I wet the bed," I say to my mother. "I did have a lot of soda last night."

She pats my head lovingly. "It’s fine. Just don’t make a habit of it. You’re a big boy now. Big boys don’t pee the bed. You’re way past the age when it’s okay to do that sort of thing."

"I won’t do it again," I say, as if I have any fucking control over it.

It’s 1980 and all is right with the world; it’s 1980 and the future seems bright. So maybe I can’t keep my bed dry and my family is poor and my deadbeat father is nowhere to be found and my mother works sixty hours a week slinging burgers just to keep her kids fed and I can’t get the image of that poor fan getting nailed by the cop out of my head because I know his fingers will never again function properly but still I’m ten and feel like I can do anything. I feel like a champion, and I’m sure this bed-wetting business is really nothing, and I’m sure my life is going to be great. What could possibly go wrong?