#150 – THE WORLD SERIES

This is my world and this has nothing to do with Gillian, who was not anyway what she seemed. Though our tryst had been a step beyond just testing through verbal discourse in the meetings. And now it seems like the world outside the meetings and the world inside are coming together in ways different from the trysting.

These new old friends were gathering in my bright airy apartment in Chelsea, this place I had not been in not for long but ever since this new life had begun. And they were gathering not for the purpose of ad hoc ACOA meetings but rather because there were things in the world we needed to check out together. They were gathering because I had a good location and a working television.

In late October they came for the 1986 World Series. And a week after the baseball game ended it was to follow the unfolding of the Iran-Contra scandal – the sociopath Ronald Reagan caught out at last it seemed. We sat around my television set watching the unfolding of a sports rivalry and then an actual war out in the world.

The world outside and this world I had been in for a year coming together. The New York Mets, perennial losers beloved by people who might not otherwise care about baseball, had somehow wound up in the World Series. When it appeared they might not lose, it seemed like the Mets players were our kind of people. Seemed this way, though team sports could be written off as institutionalized bullying. But a Mets star named Darryl Strawberry, who had had addiction problems but was now in the clear, looked happy and sad at the same time. One of us. A player named Ron Darling looked like a kid coming into his own. And as the series progressed, a Met would sometimes, when in their dugout, but his arm around another Met, like two boys on the playground – usually after something good happened – like some silly home run thing or double play thing. Two Mets would hug – just like people who recognize what is inside each other in ACOA.

The lead went back and forth until the final pitch of the final game when the Mets pitcher threw a final strike just when the Red Sox were rebounding. And on my TV we saw the pitcher toss his glove in the air, and the catcher run out and embrace him. And maybe the whole sorry team sports thing – the playground bullying – so like the horrors inside the family – maybe all that could be put away in some compartment – once the I got the goods on the real villains.

The closest I had ever been to a Mets game was passing through a room where my father was watching TV. Also, it was, now in retrospect, heart breaking that he had been so enthusiastic when for a brief time public television carried Ivy League football games.