John Bredin
My Greatest Comeback:
An Erotic Baseball Memoir
Contemplating the unfulfilled hopes of my sex life at the age of forty-three, I've
begun to seek odd clues to this mystery in baseball. However insensitive what I'm
about to say might sound, and however much it might irritate feminists, I confess that,
looks-wise, none of my past girlfriends were what I consider "major league" material.
You know the combination: a curvy figure with great breasts,
a juicy, pop-out behind, and a reasonably pretty face. Since I also crave women
with caramel skin, my sexual longings could easily be satisfied by one of the bevy
of young Latinas -- in their early 20's to mid-30's -- with surreally perfect bodies
(must be something in the milk these days) who decorate the sidewalks, buses,
and subways of the New York City metro area where I live and work, teasingly
raising my hopes with a stray smile here and there, but never yet -- and I pray
the operative word is yet -- offering to play for my team.
But ah, to imagine going a full nine-innings with one of these exotic beauties.
Or, if I'm extremely lucky, a double-header: two at the same time! In baseball terms,
maneuvering just one of these beautiful babes into bed would be the equivalent of
a game-winning grand slam -- in the bottom of the ninth with two outs.
Actually dating one would be the erotic version of a World Series ring.
And since baseball miracles do happen, like Bucky Dent's homerun
over Fenway's green monster in '78, Mookie Wilson's historic single that
bounced through Bill Buckner's legs to keep the Met's alive in '86,
and the Red Sox's recent triumph over a century's worth of bad luck,
I still have hope that my best sexual days are yet to come.
Applying a baseball metaphor to my erotic life, I choose an orgasmic variant
of the sanguine fan's eternal refrain: "wait till next year!"
I was born in 1963, the year of the lovable last place Mets. Could this have
planted a subconscious desire to lose in my budding erotic DNA?
But, alas, there are no crowds cheering in my bedroom when my performance limps lackluster
to the plate. There's nothing Thornberry-cute about it. Nor do I have a cuddly-grumpy,
Casey Stengle-esque mentor yakking it up about how "amazing" I am while I wallow dead
last in the cellar of sexual gloom, boosting my spirits till the arrival of my
own miracle "69."
My grandparents on my mother's side, both native New Yorkers, were the best
models of an erotically charged couple in my family. They were also rabid Giants fans.
As a teenager, I was astonished when I overheard my mother (on the phone with a friend)
say that her parents did it "every day and twice on Sundays" while she was growing up.
A staunch Republican conservative, my grandfather registered disapproval when I
separated from my wife of eight years in 1993. But his critique of my marital failure,
cruelly enough, manifested as a boast about his own virility and sexual success.
One bizarre Friday night in the early days of my new single-hood,
feeling alone and seeking a nostalgic grandparental visit to console me,
I innocently called to see if could drop by their Ft. Lee, New Jersey home.
But instead of a cozy, Norman Rockwell moment, I received this blistering
attack from my grandfather -- who was 75 at the time:
"How many times do I have to tell you: Friday night is my sex night!" Click.
Strangely enough he had mentioned it in casual
conversation before, along with the fact that after a golf game -- when he was all
"sweated up" -- he'd come home and pursue my grandmother a few laps around the
dining room table, until she relented and gave him sex. Whenever he said stuff
like this, though outwardly my grandmother blushed and appeared embarrassed,
you sensed that inside she was gloating big time. What woman in her 70's wouldn't
want it publicly acknowledged that her husband of over 50 years still found her
desirable? My grandfather also revealed -- to peals of laughter at a family party --
a secret weapon in his arsenal of sustained virility: The Pump.
Nor was he ashamed to publicly admit his love of porn. In a man-to-man chat once,
he offered me this nugget of homespun wisdom to try to save my faltering marriage:
"Watch a porno movie together. Then, later during sex, pretend your wife's
the woman in the film."
Not exactly a lifesaver commercial.
Aside from sex, my grandparents' other great shared
activity was watching baseball on TV. Switching their allegiance to the
Mets when the Giants moved to California in '58, they remained stalwart fans
throughout the long stretches of losing years, savoring the occasional
victories in '69, '73, and '86. As a child visiting them, I was awestruck
at their transcendent focus on a game: how "into it" they were.
When the Mets performed poorly, they were genuinely bummed out.
But if the team did something spectacular, like Ron Swoboda's
famous shoestring catch in '69, they'd leap off the suburban couch
shrieking with orgasmic delight. Only now as an adult can I make
the connection between their shared visceral enjoyment of a physical sport
(however vicariously experienced through television) and their highly potent sex-life.
But in the blue-collar, middle-class American world my grandparents inhabited,
being a knowledgeable and passionate sports fan was a badge of social approval.
Considering they were non-intellectuals, who didn't care much for serious
fiction or art or progressive politics: what else is there to talk about at parties?
As a kid at family gatherings, my inner-Nietzsche thought it was cool
how my grandfather dominated conversations with talk about the Mets.
That's my grandfather (I bragged internally) who I -- a shy nobody --
might grow up to be like. Disturbingly, he was also a much more savvy
and articulate baseball fan than my dad, who by comparison seemed girlishly
uncomfortable talking about sports. Even though he seemed to enjoy
watching a game on TV, I always suspected my dad wasn't a real fan
(rhymes with man) but was faking it because he thought it was the manly thing to do.
Though I really was an authentic Mets fan in my youth -- a fact I attribute mostly
to catching my grandparents' enthusiasm -- unfortunately I inherited my dad's
genetics when it came to speaking glibly about the sport. Sensing our mutual
skittishness with baseball talk, whenever we watched a game together there was
an embarrassed tension in the room. We were two unmanly men (pretending to be
real men) making forced, awkward comments like "that looked like a strike to me," or "wow,
did you see that catch!" Then there was the problem of the cooler kids at school,
who always had more to say about baseball than me, and who said it with greater gusto.
Not to mention the fact that, unlike me, they also played it.
In the cruel killing fields of adolescence, all the really hot girls were attracted
to the jocks. The pecking order was brutally clear, especially in my blue-collar
hometown of Edgewater, New Jersey. Now reinvented as a yuppie condo haven,
Edgewater in the seventies was a decrepit, post-war landscape dotted with
the hulking wrecks of abandoned factories like Ford Motor Co. and Alcoa Aluminum.
A poor white trash element predominated, and young male identity was established
one of two ways: sports prowess on an organized team, or being a delinquent.
Since I was neither a bad boy nor a little leaguer,
a pattern was established early in my life of hot girls not noticing me,
which I accepted as a fixed, unchangeable reality. This lack of confidence with women,
a byproduct of being a baseball loser, created a tide that was difficult to buck.
Deep in the recesses of my fragile male psyche, I was mired in Tidewater,
once the lowliest Mets farm team, patiently awaiting my rise up: up, up and away
-- dick up, me up, batter up -- to the erotic big leagues.
But at least I was an avid stickball player, engaging in regular games of fastball
or one-bounce after school. So why didn't my stickball prowess translate
into a testosterone boost? The problem with stickball was that,
while it may have been cool at one time -- especially in the poor, Italian
enclaves of New York in the forties and fifties, among scrappy kids from
the Bronx and Lower East Side who didn't have access to suburban little leagues -- in
the small town New Jersey landscape of the late 70's it branded you a loser:
unfit for the more manly combat of organized competition.
Amongst the tight-knit group of friends I played with, most of them also
played little league -- ensuring that at least their male egos were intact
while they went stickball slumming with me.
Still, though, since my stickball buddies were friends of mine,
this guilt-by-association meant that they weren't among the really cool guys in town --
meaning they weren't top-of-the-line ladies men. Even so, their early dating forays
left me in the dust, a situation I saw vaguely connected to their greater
public involvement with baseball. My friend Paul, who I actually saw pitch
in a little league game once (a glowing, mythical moment that left a profound impression)
occasionally scored with a bona fide beauty. And the same index
finger he once used to show me how to throw a curve ball with,
he utilized in another context to demonstrate how he'd made his
way to "third base" for the first time. My other buddy John went from pony
league (the precursor to little league) to stud horse, a fact he cemented
with his famous "five-some" of '97: when he managed to maneuver four girls
into his starting bed lineup. It's a conquest he continues to brag
about to this day, in that friendly, competition-between-guys way,
like Yogi Berra ribbing Derek Jeter that he's still a World Series ring behind.
I was ten-years-old when the Mets clinched the pennant in '73. Strangely enough,
my dad took me to the game. I think his motive was mainly for the sheer spectacle
of the thing, to be part of an historical moment of some sort, rather than a
genuine love for the game or team. He let me take off from school to go with him,
which I thought was really cool. Since our relationship has always been a bit
distant and reserved, perhaps he sought to repair this with some genuine
father/son bonding.
I was anxious because of our lack of engaged conversation about the game -- both
in the car ride from Jersey to Queens and back, and, more embarrassingly,
in the cold glare of public exposure in the upper deck at Shea.
No second-guessing the manager's decision. No playful predicting what might happen next.
Just two sports fan imposters, shyly adrift in this braying,
bellowing horde of testosterone, trying not to drown in a sea of virility:
amidst the scent of beer and hot dogs. Could my perception of self-failure
during baseball moments like this have poisoned my developing sense of manhood?
Did my dad's dropping the ball in his duty to model "real man-ness"
for me cripple my agency with the opposite sex, a condition I'm still recovering from?
As an emerging public intellectual, this essay is both an attempt
to name my difficult history with America's pastime (posing a possible connection
between this perceived shortcoming and my erotic problems) and a critique to move me --
and other men who suffer from this dilemma -- toward solving this sex/baseball conundrum.
At its most ambitious, it might be construed as a project to conquer and colonize baseball:
enslaving it to serve the expansion of erotic agency in the world.
Such an attack, far from being presumptuous, is justifiable as a defense strategy
in light of Noam Chomsky's theory that professional sports plays a
nefarious "bread and circuses" role in supporting oppressive society.
Viewed through this Chomskean lens, baseball fans -- their brains
stuffed with loopy theories like the curse of the Bambino, and reams of useless
trivia like who has the longest hitting streak -- far from the strong and empowered
lot I once imagined them to be, are more like a herd of passive dolts conforming
to an unjust social world: one that rewards a tiny elite with enormous wealth,
and condemns the great many to lives of quiet misery. By defeating baseball,
or at least knocking it off its exalted pedestal (even if just in my own psyche),
I kill two birds with one stone: promoting social justice while liberating my
revolutionary libido.
In his groundbreaking 2002 novel, Platform, French
writer Michel Houellebecq proclaims the death of sex in the west.
He attributes it to the hyper-competitiveness of triumphant neo-liberalism,
a condition that exhausts and de-eroticizes the space between western men and women.
Thus western males are being increasingly drawn to the sex tourism industry,
achieving erotic satisfaction via "sex vacations" in exotic locales
like Thailand or Costa Rica. And the recent critically acclaimed
film Heading South, though a fictional account, presents the
plausible scenario of a group of highly professional, middle-aged white
women from the U.S. and Europe (their prospects for romance fading) who enjoy
an annual carnal romp with teenage beach boys in Haiti.
Of course, Houellebecq's critique won't seem far-fetched to readers of Foucault,
who pointed out the sex-stifling project of capitalism in his landmark History of
Sexuality.
To keep the mega-machine running smoothly, any stray sex
that distracts people from their work must be squelched. Since
workers make better automatons when they sublimate their live,
dangerous, human-directed sexuality by fetishizing a meaningless realm,
organized sports serves the capitalist masters by creating a framework
to support the architecture of libido suppression.
Maybe my grandfather's boasting about his marital lust sessions really masked a weakness.
Though he lived to be 86, certainly a ripe enough old age,
might he have made it into his nineties (or even to 100)
if he treated himself to an occasional romp with a high-class hooker,
or sneaked off for a massage with a happy ending once in a while?
You look at those wise old Indian chiefs back in the day,
always with a bevy of hot young squaws around the teepee.
And this was years before Viagra and The Pump.
The cold truth is that many sports fans have sold out to the system, killing time at boring,
uncreative jobs; punching-in like zombies to unerotic marriages; growing beer bellies.
Sports (not sex) is their only zone of salvation: the place where their unbridled
passion meets their imagination -- romping off together in their field of dreams.
It's through sports (not sex) that these -- let's face it, still mostly men --
find what meager amount of interconnectedness and bonding and friendship life
has to offer them. Sports is how they heal the pain caused by the death of hope
in their work and love lives.
Ah, my Latina girl with the big breasts from the Lower East Side!
We met at a dance club in downtown NYC, on the night of the Mets'
famous game six against Boston. My decision to chase girls that night,
rather than watch the game, marks a significant erotic turning point for me.
When I screamed, "Who won?" out the window of my friend Paul's brown Monte Carlo,
to sidewalk stragglers at 4:00 in the morning, their cry of "Mets!" didn't match
the excitement for me of scoring my Latina's phone number.
(At the time, I was a sexual novice at twenty-three; a few scattered experiences
here and there, some from the hookers who lurked in the noirish shadows
of Manhattan's west thirties at night.)
Sadly, my Latina and I never made it to home plate -- the furthest
I got with this Hunter College student was a nice
long feel of her luscious breasts, in grand Rothian style, on a
deserted platform of the Port Authority Bus Terminal on 42nd street.
It was the closest I've come to Alex Portnoy's jerking off next
to a shiksa on a bus in the Lincoln Tunnel.
Instead I let her go,
paranoid that if she let me fondle her in public, she might be slutty enough
to have a disease (AIDS panic was at its mid-80's peak).
Thus a night that continues to cast a luminous glow in the memory of Mets fans, is
for me one conflicted with erotic ambiguity. Coulda, shoulda, woulda. One thought
that strikes me now is that I might've employed a safe-sex baseball strategy: stealing
second with my dick (probably not in the Port Authority!). Suppose, for example,
I had managed to successfully execute a tit-and-run play, coming
between her smooth tan breasts. Such an explosively pleasurable act
would've earned me a promotion up from Tidewater.
Instead, two months later I sleepwalked into an erotically
devastating eight-year marriage. We lived in Hoboken, which also happens
to be the birthplace of baseball. One sultry summer evening in '93, five years
into my libido prison-sentence, while my wife was visiting family out of town,
I picked up a girl in a local dive bar. She was pretty enough,
and the fact that she actually knew my wife from childhood added an element
of sexual intrigue. Ironically, she wound up giving me a blow job that night
on a bench in Elysian Park: the exact site of the first game of baseball ever played.
In the Hoboken Public library, a sign proclaiming "The Development
of Baseball" proudly informs:
The first seeds that led to organized baseball in
the United States were planted on the Elysian fields in Hoboken,
New Jersey on June 19, 1846.
A century-and-a-half later, on this same hallowed and idyllic location -- now
transformed into a leafy urban park with a view of Manhattan -- my own
seeds were planted: down the throat of a local bar slut at 3:00 in the morning.
In a tribute to Hoboken's abandoned Maxwell House coffee plant,
a beautiful relic of Bauhaus industrial architecture,
then perched in all its rusted-metal glory adjacent to Elysian Park,
before they razed it to make room for yuppie condos, I like to think it was
"good to the last drop."
So, being that my balls were licked where baseball was born, I mean c'mon:
if this didn't earn me a promotion out of sexual Tidewater (and into double A
erotic ball) there's no justice in this world. Also, during my stale marriage years,
the repair of my baseball-libido problems got another boost -- this time from a
peculiar source: Howard Stern. I listened to Howard on K-Rock religiously back then,
mostly on the car radio. As I monotonously drove back and forth between my
two jails of marriage and a boring corporate job, Howard's piercing wit
critiqued the routine blandness of my life: opening up a transcendent space
of freedom and possibility. When the shock jock admitted one day that
he never cared much for sports, but only feigned interest at parties to appear manly,
a felt a lifetime's worth of inferiority melting away.
YES! It's not just me! I'm not alone! rejoiced my instantly-healed psyche.
It was a profoundly transformative moment. Deep in the recesses of my sports-wounded soul,
a bubble of hope was born that day: my very own "Morning in America."
Suddenly it dawned on me that I didn't need reified, old-fashioned concepts
of manhood to attract women, but could win them over with courageous truth: a la Howard.
Admitting a weakness, even a perceived weakness (like not being into sports)
however potentially vulnerable and embarrassing, might even produce a liberating laugh.
More recently, I made the jump up to erotic A-ball -- a mere
hair below the major leagues. The magic event actually happened two years ago,
on a crisp October night at the Madison: an upscale Hoboken bar on the corner
of 14th and Washington Street. The Yankees were in the midst of one of their now
infamous post-season meltdowns. Instead of watching the game, though,
I was dancing with a hot black woman in her early twenties who was blessed with a
centerfold-perfect body. So in this ultra-trendy Hoboken bar, amongst
the stylishly-dressed crowd of yuppie sports fans, the action that
mattered most to me had nothing to do with the game and everything
to do with basking in the glow of Tyra Banks' long-lost twin.
I gloated even more when I noticed the other guys checking her out big time.
The fact that we were an interracial couple in a mostly white crowd
(Hoboken pretends to be hip, but it's still Jersey after all) added to my excitement.
The emotional highlight came while the Missy Elliot song
"Work it" was playing: a tune I associate with the potential of woman of
color to liberate my libido. The popular hip-hop track filled me with wonder
the first time I heard it: fittingly enough, at the Pleasure Chest -- a sex toy
shop on Seventh Avenue in the West Village. In its unabashed celebration
of raw female lust, the randy jingle augers a brighter sexual future for humanity.
Ah, this miracle from the public space! Free like manna, giving me a concrete
image to anchor my erotic dreams to. One fine day, in the not too distant future,
some hottie might put her thing down flip it and reverse it for ME!
The erotic hope I imbibed from "Work it" trickled like juice into the inner
fiber of my being. It stimulated the pink reptilian folds of my ball-brains with IDEAS,
flashing erotic images of ethnic beauties onto the porno
screen of my imagination: the raunchy scenes I'll one day cast, direct, and star in.
Just the astonishing fact of the song's existence as a work of pop art -- meaning
I can access it as curriculum with a girl or two, playing it to stimulate a
meaning-making dialogue -- articulated an erotic
pedagogy-in-the making. It was as if these ghetto-fabulous female voices
were whispering in my ear the first time I heard it,
while I beheld the arousing sights in the dirty store:
glorious shots on the glossy covers of $5.95 discount
VHS's (with titles like Nasty Latin
Girls,) the ultra-realistic sex toys --
this entire erotic oeuvre, but especially the song, hinting at the construction
of better sexual days to come.
Back to me dancing with the lovely at the Madison, to this booty-liscious tune,
as the Yankee game drifted into background-noise oblivion.
Drunk on the elixir of erotic hope manifesting, a strange wave of cockiness swept
over me: similar to "the wave" fad at baseball games back in the eighties.
So after the game I took command of the situation
in my Hoboken apartment; like a good baseball field manager: Me, my own Joe Torre!
I instructed her to put on a pre-game show just for me, strip-teasing
and entertaining me with her hands, all of this leading to my eventual shot-heard-round-the-world.
So put me in coach, I'm ready to play, today...
Gearing up for my first major league sex game, my butt eager to leave the bench,
I'd like to utilize baseball's vaguely erotic iconography:
its vocabulary rich with double-entendres like "steal home," "balls,"
and "he's up;" the dance-like, physical fluidity of the game;
the reflective moments of intense concentration (like a man gazing rapturously
at a beautiful naked woman) followed by a quick flurry of action;
the uniforms that highlight the male anatomy -- making a visual feast
of the bulge in the crotch; the planning and executing of particular strategies;
the long, languorous summer afternoons: and render this entire cultural
idiom a work of interactive erotic-possibility art.
For example, let's say I'm lounging on the couch with a cutie, channel-surfing with
the remote control. As I settle briefly on a Mets game, the announcer informs us that
Carlos Beltran is up with two balls. Seizing the moment to open up an erotic space,
I teasingly offer: "You know I have...two balls too." My cutie eagerly joins me
in this project to make baseball our sex slave, purring: "Yah, but are you up?"
while her eyes devour me and she reaches for my remote control.
As for my strategy to win major league quality females, I'll simply continue to
grow as a writer: starting right now with this essay. In Finding Forrester,
a film rich with baseball imagery, the key emotional transaction between Forrester
(the grizzled old Caucasian writer played by Sean Connery) and Jamal (his young Black acolyte) takes place
in an empty, magically illuminated Yankee Stadium. In another scene, shocked
by Forrester's assertion that writers read their work in public mostly to get laid,
Jamal inquires with childish innocence: "You mean women will sleep with you if
you write a book?" In the wise gravitas that comes so easily to Connery,
Forrester responds: "Women will sleep with you if you write a bad book."
Is Connery my Casey Stengle?
So I'll keep writing (and hopefully improving my craft) until I have enough
pieces for a book that, even if it doesn't win the Pulitzer, will -- at least
according to Forrester -- make beautiful
women want to sleep with me. And for all you guys out there who
feel less deserving of great women because you're not into sports, let this
essay liberate you by deconstructing the oppressive link between sports
savvy and masculine appeal. Feel free to share it with a woman you're
attracted to, if she's brainy enough to get the somewhat academic nature of the piece.
If she's cerebral and sexy, the multiplied-by-imagination pleasure possibilities
might earn you both a place in the Erotic Hall of Fame.
So have fun, be safe, and go get your game on!
As for me, while I patiently await my first crack at bat in the erotic majors
(I just met this yummy 21-year-old Japanese woman on the L train from Brooklyn
to Manhattan. Maybe she'll be the one?), I see myself as a Roger Clemens type: aging
but still potent,
good for one more go-around, showing the young whippersnappers a thing or two,
still able to rear back on my haunches and smoke one in.
©2009 by John Bredin
