The building in Red Hook that I wanted sat on Third Avenue. I pushed through the door in a mood of apprehension, because I remembered how much Timothy had liked the place when we'd been there a few years before, and returning now was a measure of my fall since then. But I kept going. The first room, a murky cave of pinball and video games, sold cheap sports memorabilia and junk food. Boys in mismatched Little League uniforms ran pell-mell. I could hear rock music and every few seconds a loud metallic clang. Through a doorway, a much larger room appeared, under this sign:
35 MPH: All Youngsters Under 9
45 MPH: Youngsters 9 and Older
55 MPH: Youngsters 10 and Older
65 MPH: Youngsters 11 and Older
75 MPH: Teenagers 13 and Older
85 MPH: Teenagers 17 and Older
95 MPH: Special Access, Mgt. Approval Required
Behind a high curtain of netting, the pitching machines were firing baseballs at the batters. I stood for a moment behind the 45 mph machine as a lanky boy of about ten swung at pitch after pitch with an aluminum bat. The balls seemed pretty fast, but he made contact with every third pitch or so. A middle-aged man in a green Jets cap stepped in and adjusted the boy's stance, the ball whizzing past his eyebrows. Baseball is still sacred in Brooklyn, in a way it never could be on the East Side of Manhattan, and the Red Hook cages are part of a world where forgotten old men sit in lawn chairs in the lumpy fields of public parks, eating unlit cigars and catching smoking rockets from young hurlers, boys whose mothers bleach the uniforms the night before a game, a game often as not umped by a cop or fireman and which, if played at the Ty Cobb Little League field near Avenue X, will be watched not only by the black residents of the housing project across the street and the mothers and fathers sitting on the cement bleachers, but by the men who run the maintenance train of the subway's N line, men who park the massive yellow-and-black engines on the elevated track that directly overlooks right field; on the rare occasion when a boy clanks a ball off the home run wall, one of the men climbs nonchalantly into the cab of the engine and yanks the horn as the boy circles the bases. That's Brooklyn, Brooklyn baseball.
I moved on. No sign of Jay. A knot of hollering, hot-dog-stuffing boys clustered behind each machine, and the noise was formidable. At the 75 mph cage, I watched one of the boys lean in too close over the plate and take a pitch right on the temple of his batting helmet; his coach reached inside the steel fence, hit the red stop button, and went to pick up his player, who shook off the injury. Of course I thought of Timothy, ten now, quite capable of swinging a bat as hard as many of these kids.
At the far end of the building lay the 95 mph cage and through the many layers of wire mesh I could see a large figure in T-shirt and shorts taking dramatic cuts at the ball. Others were watching him, and as I approached I realized it was Jay, with something made of green plastic sticking out of his mouth. He clanged an enormous shot. I got closer and saw that the device clenched in his mouth was an inhaler; between pitches he squeezed down on it, shooting whatever chemicals it contained into himself.
I melted in among the others, worried and fascinated. I knew Jay was a big man, of course, but his body had always been cloaked by a suit or heavy winter coat; here, now, I plainly saw a man about six foot three, two hundred and forty pounds, powerful in the arms and chest and back, with a little extra in the gut, and, most notably, heavily muscled legs that swelled below the knee into enormous, veined calves, large as a comic book superhero's, three times normal size, and oddly, even disturbingly, compelling- beautiful fruits of muscle that splayed widely from the downward line of his legs- legs that Allison had presumably had between her own. Jay and I were not sexual rivals, but we weren't exactly not, either. I wondered if Allison measured our deep but solitary kiss in the Havana Room only a few hours earlier against the ongoing pleasures Jay had provided her. The question was silly but the answer was yes, of course, and seeing Jay's obvious vitality, I thought it was possible that Allison would shrug off our brief intimacy as silly or wrong.
'Fuckin' freak,' sniggered one of the teenage boys hanging their fingers through the wire fencing. 'Sucking on that thing, fucking cocaine gas or something.'
'It's brain steroids, like makes your bat speed faster. Major leaguers use them secretly before they come out of the dugout.'
'That's totally fucked, man.'
'No it's not! Every major league dugout has like this little bathroom next to it. Guys go in there, toke on that stuff, and come out and hit. Why you think the home run records keep getting broken? It wasn't all the muscle stuff, it was the brain stuff.'
'You have like no fucking idea what you're talking about.'
'Look, he's hitting it, you pussy.'
Indeed he was, and not just dinging them back or popping them up but swinging his bat parallel to the ground and driving the ball straight back against the mesh at the far end, one after another. Then he missed, and the ball rocketed against the screen in front of me. He let out a muffled roar of frustration, then gave himself two shots of the drug, seemingly swelling up with them before the next pitch came.
Which it did, and Jay got a piece of the ball, clanking it hard against the screen fifteen feet up. He roared again, and slammed the bat into the earth.
'See?' said the boy, stroking what he hoped was a mustache. 'Freakman. Steroids in the brain, making him crazy.'
Jay dug his cleats in and took a practice swing, then pulled the bat back to the loaded position, knees bent, head up, right elbow high and a little jumpy. The mechanical arm lifted and Jay rocked and cocked, as the coaches say, and when the ball came he was ready and drilled it into the nets.
'Haaa!' came his cry of satisfaction. The sound was sexual, murderous.
'See?' announced one of the boys. 'See that?'
'I see your momma.'
' Your momma fucked my baseball bat.'
'Yeah, the one your sister gave her after she was done with it.'
'You mean the one you licked for three hours.'
'Shut up,' said a third boy, 'he's switch-hitting.'
I watched Jay shift from rightie to leftie and swing at another forty pitches or so. Batting from the left, he wasn't nearly as effective, and missed every other pitch. But of course being able to switch-hit well is one of the rarest of skills in baseball, and I was intrigued that he was even trying it, especially with balls coming at major league speed. The back of his shirt grew dark between the shoulder blades, then a red light on the pitching machine popped on, signaling the end of the session.
'No good,' Jay snarled to himself. He spat the inhaler out of his mouth, flipping it up in the air before him, and swung at it with the bat. It shattered and its metal canister flew in our direction, skittering over the dirt.
'He always does that, too,' said one of the boys, 'that's how come I know it's brain steroids.'
Jay pushed up his helmet and started to pull off his batting gloves. I slipped back a step, thinking that it might not be right to confront him there, before so many people, while he held a baseball bat and was under the effects of whatever drug he'd been inhaling.
'Yo, mister,' cried one of the boys. 'What you got in that thing?'
'I'm finding out,' said the other boy, and he scampered into the cage. Jay watched him with disinterest. The boy scooped up the canister from the dirt and ran back.
'What is it?'
The boys studied the fine print and I edged closer for my own look.
'Ad-ren-o-something.'
'Let me see that, you fucking illiterate.'
'Hey, yo mister,' one of the boys hooted.
A heavyset man in his twenties in a Rangers jersey suddenly appeared, bent low to the boy, and spoke harshly to him, glancing up at Jay now and then.
'Okay, okay,' the boy protested. Then he and the other boys ran off with their prize.
Adrenaline. In aerosol form. Did it really help one's bat speed? The idea made a kind of crazy sense. Jay opened the cage door and lurched forward through the crowd, his Yankees cap down low over his forehead, a coat and sweatpants slung over his shoulder, eyes on the ground, his face angry and determined and oblivious to all,
