Volume 6, Entry 2: The Red Stealth

On love and dreams and violence

It was love at first sight.

In truth, it was more love at first sound because the aluminum twang of the ball finding its sweet spot made you look up in the first place, but then you saw it, and the metallic cherry red overwhelmed your heart through your eyes as though your arteries were moonlighting as optic nerves and all the pumping went straight back to your pupils. You liked your blue TPX with the red grip—you homered with it once, with an assist from that scrawny thirteen-year-old who misread your line drive’s exit velocity—but you filed divorce papers and moved out the moment you saw the bat leave the hitter’s hands as he ran to first. That you didn’t race out to the box, grab it, and gently run off to Mexico with it marked your first moment of maturity.

There never was, nor has there ever been, another like the Red Stealth.

Underneath its painted exterior is nothing more than metal, but oh, that painted exterior. There’s wearing makeup, and then there’s transforming into an ethereal being spawned directly from the heavens. This was the bat swung by the angels in their collegiate baseball games in the clouds. How had it landed here, on earth? What immortal being would spoil the rest of eternity by letting go of their Red Stealth?

The perfection of that red had no rival. Red doesn’t gleam, but this metallic red glistened like a perfectly rounded ruby with a handle. Despite their basic font, the thick letters wowed you, EASTON on one side and STEALTH on the other, in white then gray then black, that pops like a hanging curveball going the other way. That name STEALTH should have made you laugh—Marilyn Monroe does not an undercover operative make—but you don’t even think of it as a word because you’re so smitten. And that doesn’t even account for the silver opti-flex connector that glitters like all the diamonds you’d buy for it or that sleek, perfectly wrapped handle engineered for comfort. Where have you been all my life, you yearn to whisper in the ear it doesn’t have.

Over and over that first night, you watch it clobber baseballs. You can’t take your eyes off it, but your ears swoon with every foul tip, let alone the parade of frozen ropes you watch launch from it. Years later, you will shudder thinking about the terrifying trampoline effect wrought by that bat, but nothing in the world could have convinced you the Red Stealth could be anything but immortal perfection personified…err, batified.

You were at the Sports Shop the next day. You spotted the Red Stealth instantly, hanging immaculately on the rack as though waiting for you . There should have been sticker shock—it was more than you had ever spent on baseball equipment—and you should have paused to consider that you don’t play baseball anymore, but its candy red drenched the world with so much rose that you would have handed it one on your season of The Bachelor. We do foolish things when we are in love; you bought a drop-three bat that set your minimum-wage-making ass back $300+ with tax.

You’d have paid triple.

That first game, when all the older guys took their swings, you felt your first pangs of regret. You’d brought home a 33-30 rather than a 32-29 or something even lighter, barely considering the weight distribution until Mikey was swinging through basic provolone and Patrick remarked that he preferred the Voodoo (an ugly rod, you assured the Red Stealth later). But when Drake lined a single to right-center, that glorious ping threatened to undo your composure. Saint Peter himself sighed when that sound found his ears over the buzzing line of eager entrants to the afterlife. You’d tolerate the inevitable underperformance by these freshmen and middle schoolers. After all, it’d be yours for hitting outfield.

Your Hurricanes won the championship that year, and the Red Stealth sat unused by all but Drake during that final game. No matter. You got your trophy, and the Red Stealth took fewer bullets. It would remain in your bag for years to come, tagging along as composites forced the regulatory commissions to act; as BBCOR rose and then gave way to BESR, it was always by your side. Concealing such beauty in a fading, broken-zippered bag was a cruelty, was a slap in the face to the gift from Olympus you’d brought home in April 2005, but you always assured it you wouldn’t forget.

And you didn’t. When you played in the first alumni game, the only one where aluminum bats were allowed, you finally brought it to the plate yourself. You’d get a few hits with woodies in later games, a few of those strokes suggesting potential pasts you might have had in a different life, but in that first game, you brought to the plate your one, your only, your always. You were a round lump then, but with the Red Stealth in your hands, you belonged on the runway.

You didn’t do much early, your rust showing, but that last at-bat, you faced Ben. You loved Ben, you loved coaching Ben, you loved hearing about where Ben was coaching and the success his pitching staff was having. But when Ben grooved a fastball over the plate rather than his wicked curveball, you took a swing with the bat you’d always dreamed of swinging in a real game like this, and when you connected, right on that sweet spot no one ever managed to find in 2005, you heard the sound that had stolen your heart and felt the explosion off that metallic cherry red barrel vibrate through you with the tender caress of perfect contact.

The ball flew as if shot from a cannon. Later, removed from that moment of ecstasy in the box, that fit of passion rounding first, you would sigh with relief that your consummation hadn’t been a few degrees to the left or you might have exploded Ben’s skull. You knew as you stood on first and watched Mike carry it back to the on-deck circle that you would never swing the bat live like that again. You couldn’t. Forget the rules: you understood the danger lurking within the one who still made your heart leap a decade later.

As you grinned on first base, adjusting your helmet while taking your signs from Carey, you knew you had just experienced your one torrid moment together. Your first and your last, both in the same low-stakes pickup game with guys seven years your junior. You should have felt a lump of sadness while you took your lead, enough for Ben’s quick move over to pick you off, but you couldn’t get the sensation of that swing out of your mind. It was glorious. It was epiphany. Hitting with the Red Stealth was everything you’d ever dreamed it would be.

You’d never forget that feeling, but of course you wouldn’t. How could anyone forget the most beautiful thing they’d ever seen? What heartless monster could unremember the Red Stealth?

A saner person would have sheathed it in their bag after shaking hands and dragging the field, but you carried it to the parking lot. While everyone else talked about highlights and pizza, you and the Red Stealth regarded the stars together. Your moment had come and gone. It was so fleeting! But that, you think as you press your thumb against its aging grip under the emerging moonlight, is love.

The Red Stealth and you will always have that Nottoli night under the lights.

Always.

*****

You visited the Sports Shop a week later.

You weren’t coaching baseball then, so your trips to see Debbie, Mark, and Mona were fewer and farther between than they once were. They’d still smile when you walked in, especially if you brought your mom. It was a reunion, even though you carried out engraved Mathletes trophies rather than buckets of balls or sacks of yellow socks.

There was no reason to shop there anymore. You did not need new baseball equipment. You’d bought a new glove once—a lefty glove, when you foolishly convinced yourself you could become a southpaw—and you’d purchased hats there, too, but your budget no longer bulged to accommodate catchers’ masks and lineup cards. The floor of the store had become a museum of colorful fancies meant for others’ hands, others’ bags, and others’ garages.

No matter the visit, you always browsed the bats. You couldn’t resist. You always walked away shaking your head, confident that modern engineering and design would never eclipse Easton’s in the early-aughts. Everything you saw enticed you, even later when your shitty spine stole your ability to swing, but you only had eyes for one. You would only have eyes for

And then you saw it.

You did a double-take. You blinked over and over, trying to clear the obvious hallucination. With two fingers, you pinched yourself, an automatic performance of disbelief meant to prick you back to reality, but nothing changed in your line of sight. Nothing obstructed the cherry red metallic finish or the blocky white letters outlined in gray and black.

STEALTH

With shaking hands, you pried it off the shelf. This was a dream. It had to be a dream! There in your hands was a brand-new Red Stealth. Gleaming in the artificial lights, you stared like your corneas were magnetic, your fingers caressed the opti-flex connector, your thumb pressed against the gentle resistance of the original Easton grip tape. You remembered those wild, lumbering cuts Mikey took in its maiden voyage, but you also remembered the shot you laced off Ben that could have been through Ben, but how could you think of violence in the face of such grace as this? A shiver raced through your soul.

This was impossible. How had this remained on the rack for a decade? When did the plague of blindness befall the county? You didn’t want to live in a world where the Red Stealth would be left hanging without a pair of adoring eyes and a loving home.

You spun it in your hands, and your memory solved the mystery. That fear you’d felt when the ball exploded off the sweet spot and whizzed past Ben’s head provided the answer: the Red Stealth was illegal now. The Red Stealth had become the weapon it had surely always been. No one wanted to purchase an expensive bat that couldn’t be used in a game. It was unsafe. It was silly.

Plus, it was a drop-9. A youth-league bat. Were it a drop-3 like yours, maybe a well-off high school hitter splurges on a whirlwind affair during summer BP, but a drop-9 offers no training value. Only a middle schooler would benefit from such a tool.

Replacing it on the rack felt like betrayal, but you didn’t need a bat. Even if you did, no one in your present orbit could use that bat. It was pointless. The most perfect creation the universe had ever proffered would remain there because there was no reason it should come with you.

Drops of blood from your broken heart traced your path through the parking lots.

That night, you had a dream. It wasn’t a dream so much as a vision—you couldn’t sleep—but it came to you like a dream. You had been nineteen when Easton released the Red Stealth. It captivated you from the first moment you locked eyes on it. Holding it for the first time took your breath away. Whitney Houston serenaded you when you carried it to the plate. What a gift every moment with that bat had been.

Your vision seized on that word: gift. It was springtime for you, but your vision summoned winter. Branches cling to crumpled leaves. Passersby on the sidewalk rub gloved hands together, their small dogs’ teeth chattering. Inside the adjacent house, a fireplace crackles. The smell of baking ham fills every room with warmth matched only by the gentle chatter echoing in the living room. A Henson fable plays on the TV but can’t keep pace with the jolly laughter bouncing around the room.

It’s not an early Christmas where the wrapping paper’s torn through as though by rookie werewolves. You’re twelve Christmases in by now. Everyone embraces the merriment without losing their heads. All the gifts lay unwrapped, rectangular mysteries morphed into tidy stacks, and everyone takes turns breathing in the final fragrances of the intimate generosity. There won’t be many more like this, you think with a sigh.

There’s a moment of pause.

“Well, that’s all of them,” she says with a nod. But she shoots you a glance, eyes darting like a furtive reindeer, so quickly that you only notice it in your memory.

Your eyes light up. You clear your throat.

“Except for one,” you say, your voice barely a whisper through a poorly suppressed grin.

Reaching behind your recliner, you withdraw yet one more rectangular prism. Wrapped shoddily on the ends and with laughably too much paper, this box is long, maybe a yard in length. There’s a single bow on the top—pre-tied and adhesive, thank you, Raley’s—but it droops when you rotate the package to pass it over.

He isn’t a little kid anymore and hasn’t been for years, but when you hand him that box, there’s a moment when his eyes shed six years. The whole world is a wonder again. That tidy stack contained everything he’d asked for and even a thing or two he’d been too embarrassed to want aloud, but this surprises him. This is a wonder. Where did this come from? He knows from the shape precisely what it has to be—he has to see; his teachers have never lamented his deductive reasoning—yet curiosity overtakes him as he ponders why this and why now.

“Really?” he asks, his hands taking the box with an adult firmness they didn’t have two years prior. “Wha…”

His intrigue is so great he doesn’t even cross the t. He carefully turns the box so that the contents gently roll around the angular space rather than thunk.

“Should I—“

“Open it,” she says because she knows you can’t get the words out. Her eyes are on you, not him, because she knows how long you’ve waited, but you wouldn’t know that because you are watching him.

With shaking hands, he peels back the paper. At first, his fingers move gingerly, but by the end, you catch a few shreds suiting an unbridled kindergartner. The cardboard box he finds says Louisville Slugger, but he’s already prying the tape off the top and pulling back the lid.

You watch. Flecks of nervousness swell in your throat; they taste like gingerbread. A million objections batter around your brain. This is so stupid, you admonish yourself. He can’t even use the thing!

Out it slides from its box and into his no longer small hands.

What if he wants to quit? What if that last game of all-stars soured him?

Exiting knob-first, he closes his fingers around the unfamiliar black tape and pulls with cautious curiosity.

What if he hates it? What if he finds it garish and ugly and

His eyes widen as metallic cherry red reaches your living room. You watch his heart melt in front of you. Unblinking eyes, jaw slowly dropping, his hands quivering, he runs his fingers along the letters. The pull, the attraction, the romance of the Red Stealth is genetic.

“It’s not game legal,” you say, trying to get ahead of your screaming heart. “You can’t—”

“I love it.” It comes out a whisper from another dimension. “I love it,” his lips suggest again, but he means it so much that he leaves the syllables in the discarded box to devote every ounce of energy to staring at it.

The distant creaks of a chair being left barely finds you on an alien planet. Her hand makes its way to your shoulder and then to your face to wipe away the silent tears he hasn’t yet noticed because he can’t look up, he can’t look away, but you don’t acknowledge her. You just watch, petrified by the indescribable joy of sharing the original owner of your adult heart with him, of preserving it all those years for this moment and watching his heart grow three sizes in one glance.

“Happy Christmas,” she whispers in your ear. It barely registers over his fading “I love it.”

You return to the Sports Shop the following week. Your mom tags along. She’s delivering a check, but you have other plans. If it’s gone, it’s gone, the damned world finally coming to its senses, but if it’s there, it’s yours, so it can one day be his.

It’s there.

With a gasp, you remove it from the rack for the last time. Your hands shake anew, stricken by your vision. Your mom laughs when she sees it and rolls her eyes, but you smile.

“Just in case,” you say. She beams, no doubt playing grandchildren visions of her own.

When you hand it to Debbie at the register, she looks up at you, the hint of a question mark in her eyes. You smile and finish the full phrase.

“In case I have a son.”

She smiles, too, then. The bat’s already on sale, but she gives you the big discount, a price that says he’s going to love it, even though he doesn’t exist. You swell with pride at your foresight: you’ve bought him a Christmas gift before he is born.

Every night you go to sleep, you drift away, picturing your daughter’s tiny hand in yours.

It’s only fair that you buy the most beautiful thing in the world to place in your son’s.

*****

When I coached the JV team, I was the muscle.

It’s hilarious: I was beefy and round, muscular only by the most generous assumption. But I was young, the youngest by multiple decades, so I clobbered fly balls from the foul line to the basketball courts. I took a line during infield drills with orders to “Challenge ‘em”.

The bat I swung might have been older than me. An aesthetic abomination, it was nothing but heather gray steel and a few bulky letters. The handle was a singular eroded sleeve of rubber that moved when I swung. For a geezer, that bat had pop—nobody cared about safety then—and the ball flew off its barrel, but the sound was as dulled as its coat. It thudded the ball with a dull thwack.

By the time Tyler and Drew were seniors, I’d left the program, only to visit for the big games and Senior Day. They were Challenge Day leaders, though, their openness and influence the greatest gifts they could give me, but a month or so after the night the three of us and Sophia stayed until 10:00 talking, they brought me another present. It was the aluminum fungo.

“They were throwing it out,” Tyler said.

“It belongs here,” said Drew.

So it was that I kept that crappy bat behind my desk from 2013 to 2017. When a demonstration called for it, like the BC baseball game we staged when Marc took whiffle ball hacks against Denis with the desks cleared out, I’d let it make an appearance. But mostly, it sat back there. It just sat.

In 2017, near the end of school, Nate took it to Scandia to hit in the batting cages. This was fine; no bat was more perfect for a beginner’s BP. I told him to take it. But one day, he returned without the bat. The Scandia Fun Center had swallowed it up. It would never return.

The year prior, we had our first lockdown. This was the car chase that crashed into Wrap N Roll, the best restaurant near my new house, but we didn’t know that when Sandy shouted, “This isn’t a drill!” over the intercom to anyone still on campus. After herding the just-leaving Maia, Christine, and some randos into the room, we huddled in the dark under the desks.

Instinctively, before accurate Twitter insight delivered relief, I grabbed that aluminum bat. I didn’t know what was coming, but while potential threats lurked, holding it in my hands felt safer to protective-me.

When the bat disappeared, I didn’t think much of it. Did I feel a touch of nostalgic loss for the thing? Of course—that’s who I am. But I didn’t feel more afraid in the classroom without it. Only in that moment that ultimately killed the sushi burrito did I associate the thing with protection.

Two months ago, after reading yet another report of a shooting on a school campus, I thought of that aluminum bat. In some report or column discussing such violence, I read a line that said all school employees should be “prepared” to “counter” a monster invading campus.

As I’ve written before, on the advice of a resource officer, I decided years ago what I would do if an intruder entered my classroom. My plan hasn’t changed: my goal will be to bull rush the attacker and hope that surprise gets me close enough to knock them down. At whatever cost, I would buy time for students to flee if I didn’t subdue the person.

When I made that plan, though, I was a large man. My body was heavy enough to be a deterrent. Much as my eyes deceive me now, my body is different. Unless a potential gunman is small, there’s only so much disruption I can dish out.

Which made me wish I had the bat. The thing was light and compact; I could swing it like it was nothing. They’d engineered that bat with no regard for safety; even a person with a busted spine could swing it with incredible, instantaneous force. That dumb fungo had no place in the batting cages of our program that is the envy of the county, but it was the perfect backup plan in the event of the most awful kind of emergency walking into HL-5.

But, of course, that bat is gone.

Now, I still have several bats from my coaching days, but all of them are either light wooden fungoes made of borderline balsa or far too heavy for me to swing with the kind of force required by defending the lives of the people in my stead. Adrenaline and sheer mortal terror would surely augment what I’ve got left in my upper body, but why would I risk it? This is the emergency of emergencies, the terror that races through my brain whenever the classroom door opens. I needed a lighter bat that nonetheless packed the same wallop of the real deal.

And, of course, I have one of those.

Sitting in a cardboard box, it hides behind my luggage in the back of my closet. Still immaculate, sullied only by the original sticker and the Sports Shop’s green price tag, a drop-9 Red Stealth waits for a little boy who will never be born.

Striking with the force of a baseball bat, the idea was so obvious it felt like terrifying fate. As soon as it landed, a new vision arrived, but this time, it was monstrous and morbid: my chest riddled with bullets, bleeding out on the dirty classroom carpet that can barely handle water, and the gunman’s face smashed in by a metallic cherry bat now coated by a different, more sobering shade of red. When the students returned years later to commemorate the trade that curtailed that violence with a vigil, they would remember the Red Stealth with reverence reminiscent of my own. It was to be his son’s, one would think. Because it wasn’t, I lived to meet mine.

It’s violence that every day I drive to school, I mentally rehearse my death, but that’s what the officer told us to do during his presentation. “I can’t make it for you,” he said with practiced gravity. “Decide today what you’re willing to sacrifice.”

It didn’t take long to decide, as I told Abby weeks later when we talked about it before she burst into tears. Truthfully, I had already decided: the drills police staged on campus that I participated in made clear the horrifyingly realistic possibility of gun violence. After watching an actor clad in black lug assault rifles through the quad while I hid behind a brick post, I joined David and several others at Moana, but my mind buzzed over an automatic resolution. All the fatalism in my mind made sense. There was no decision to be made if this ever became real.

Eight Decembers later, I fish around my closet, pushing aside the costumes and jerseys. For a moment, I wonder if it has disappeared, if that entire second trip to the Sports Shop might have been a dream, but at last, my fingertips scrape something. The box comes out with ease. It feels nearly weightless.

Slowly, I withdraw the bat from its prison. The grip tape shows signs of deterioration, six flaps of corrugated cardboard no match for the hands of a clock, but it evokes gentle use, like that of a young boy holding it in the mirror every night before bed. The opti-flex connection sparkles like always, unblemished by the pine tar still scarring my original, and that metallic cherry red with those big boxy STEALTH letters slowly fills my field of vision. Staring down at it above my limp khaki carpet puts the floor to shame. The Red Stealth, even in such different hands than those that tucked it away nine years ago, puts the world to shame. Just as some part of my crush on Kayte will forever persevere, so too will my heart beat for this incredible creation. I tremble with it in my hands.

There is no decision to make. This whole thing has been on the nose from the start. There will be no Christmas mornings, there will be no hand on my shoulder, there will be no widening eyes gazing down in awe with the same corneas as mine. This was a fantasy. This is a fantasy. So, I pray, is the violence I flinch over eighteen times per school day, that flashes through my head whenever the door opens or a desk moves or I hear a scream of glee from the quad and, for a few seconds, can’t quite detect the giddy joy.

You would trade everything for their futures, so of course you would swap your fantasy for them. Under these theoretical yet equally terrible circumstances, it’s an easy trade. You’ll take the box to school and slide the Red Stealth under your desk. There is no decision to make. Letting go of that dream is a sacrifice, but a noble one. There is no decision to make. You’ve already decided.

But shit, you think. And then you say it out loud. “Shit.” You shake your head while your fingers trace the S. You lift the bat to your nostrils and inhale the stale musk of neglected metal. It feels so powerful in your hands that your heart skips another beat. “Shit.” You never forget your first love.

You never forget your first love, and you never forget seeing joy in the eyes of a small, if unreal, human whose eyes are impossibly, wondrously, immutably yours.

Bat in hand, you stand there. You stand there too long. Time stops in your closet while you gaze at that bat. When you blink, you see his eyes (which are your eyes) looking down at the same Red Stealth you see now. You are him right now. You are him, even though he is not.

An imaginary number for all the reals, you think. All you have to do is let go. There is no decision to make.

“Shit.” You stroke the barrel with your index finger. “Shit.” It comes out a sigh.

You know what you have to do.

*****

Underneath my desk sits a bat. Abby’s frog-monkey cradles it gently, but it also elevates it slightly. I’m not good at bending, but I’ve been practicing. I grab it once per day to make the move automatic.

Just in case.

I don’t admire it, though. It’s not a tool for admiration. This bat is a weapon; this bat is a last resort. If I ever have to swing it, to unleash twenty times the force I did to line that single up the middle off Ben, that swing will be my final act. I pray I never, ever have reason to unleash the violence Easton engineered it to enact in a different context. I don’t want to swing that bat.

But I wouldn’t want to anyway.

It’s some used bat I bought on eBay in December.

It’s a Black Stealth.

---

This is my favorite thing I’ve written in some time. There’s a full spectrum of emotions here while it careens from funny to wistful to defeated to defiant. I also liked the way the point of view turned out. I’m fine if it doesn’t strike people the same way—the baseball of section one will turn many off—but it doesn’t change how true any part of it is.

I had fun with this. Summoning old feelings and then interpreting them creatively from a new place is a pleasure.