“Okay.”
“Really? Thanks, hon. And if you could pick up a box of Franzia on the way home, the pink one, we’re out.”
“You owe me tonight,” Bill says, and hangs up before she can respond.
Bill looks around the empty stadium, appreciating the stillness. He needs this kind of stillness—clean of movement. He thinks about the incident on the bus. Edwin. It could still make Bill laugh just to think of it. He smiles a smile he can’t contain. On his first day of work, Edwin got into it with a vet on the bus. Bill doesn’t know how it started, but whatever happened, the bus driver ended up kicking both of them off the bus. Then the guy chased Edwin all the way down International in his wheelchair. Luckily he chased him in the right direction and Edwin made it to work on time despite getting kicked off the bus—probably because he got chased. Bill laughs out loud thinking about Edwin running for his life down International. Making it on time to work a sweaty mess. Well, that part wasn’t funny, actually. That part made it sad.
Bill walks by a metal surface on the east wall. He sees himself reflected there. He steadies his unstable, distorted reflection in the dented metal paneling, straightens his shoulders, picks up his chin. That guy in the black windbreaker, whose hair is fully grayed and receding, and whose stomach comes out a little more each year, whose feet and knees hurt when he stands or walks too long, he’s okay, he’s making it. He could easily not be making it. He’s almost always not been making it.
This coliseum, the team, the Oakland Athletics, had once been the most important thing in the world for Bill, during that magical time for Oakland, 1972 to 1974, when the A’s won three World Series in a row. You don’t see that happen anymore. It’s too much of a business now, they would never allow that. Those were strange years for Bill, bad, awful years. He’d gotten back from Vietnam after going AWOL in ’71, dishonorably discharged. He hated the country and the country hated him. There were so many drugs coursing through him then it was hard to believe he could still remember any of it. Most of all he remembers the games. The games were all he had then. He had his teams, and they were winning, three years in row, right when he needed it, after what felt to Bill like a lifetime of losing. Those were the years of Vida Blue, Catfish Hunter, Reggie Jackson, the bastard Charlie Finley. And then when the Raiders won in ’76, two championships that San Francisco teams hadn’t won yet, it was a really good time to be from Oakland, to feel that you were from that thing, that winning.
He got hired at the coliseum in 1989, after doing five years at San Quentin for stabbing a guy outside a biker bar on Fruitvale down by the railroad tracks. It wasn’t even Bill’s knife. The stabbing was coincidental, it was self-defense. He didn’t know how the knife ended up in his hand. Sometimes you just did things, you acted or reacted the way you needed to. The problem had been that Bill couldn’t get his own story straight. The other guy had been less drunk. Had a more consistent story. So Bill took the fall. It was his knife somehow in the end. He was the one with a history of violence. The crazy AWOL Vietnam vet.
But jail had been good to Bill. He read almost the whole time he was in. He read all the Hunter S. Thompson he could get his hands on. He read Hunter’s lawyer, Oscar Zeta Acosta. He loved The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo and The Revolt of the Cockroach People. He read Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Carver and Faulkner. All the drunks. He read Ken Kesey. He loved One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He was pissed when they made the movie and the Native guy, who was the narrator of the whole book, just played the crazy silent stoic Indian who threw the sink through the window at the end. He read Richard Brautigan. Jack London. He read history books, biographies, books about the prison system. Books about baseball, football. California Native history. He read Stephen King and Elmore Leonard. He read and kept his head down. Let the years dissolve the way they could when you were somewhere else inside them, in a book, on the block, in a dream.
Another good year that came out of bad times for Bill was 1989, when the A’s swept the San Francisco Giants. When, in the middle of the World Series, just before the start of Game 3, the earth slipped. Dropped. Quaked. The Loma Prieta earthquake killed sixty-three people, or sixty-three people died because of it. The Cypress freeway collapsed, and someone drove right off the Bay Bridge, where a section had collapsed in the middle. That was the day baseball saved lives in Oakland and in the greater Bay Area. If more people hadn’t been at home, sitting around the TV, watching the game, they would have been on freeways, they would have been out in the world, where it was collapsing, just falling apart.