Communism

My brother Lou, freshman year of high school, got cut from the baseball team. None of it made sense. Lou was a catcher and teams always needed catchers and my brother was a beast, on the traveling team every year of Little League, including the group that made it to Williamsport and took seventh place. He was my hero. Most of the kids on that team were freshmen with Lou. By junior year, they were expected to win state.

Later, we realized the varsity had a new coach and his son was Lou’s year and, lo and behold, a catcher, not as good as Lou. Why not keep them both? Guys can’t catch every game. I guessed they didn’t want Lou making the other kid look bad. Maybe they’d be tempted to play Lou instead. So they cut him.

Lou played Babe Ruth that summer, made the All-Star team, and everyone assumed he would try out for the high school team again sophomore year. He didn’t.

“Fuck that.” 

Lou got into other things. He took shop and before long could rip a car apart and put it back together just like that. He got a job with a nearby garage, and right before his junior year ended, he dropped out, already making more money than our dad. 

That varsity coach later got fired for diddling a girl student in the driver’s ed room, and his kid, that mediocre catcher, transferred out. The team didn’t really have a catcher and finished under .500 for years. It all started with Lou getting cut freshman year.

~

Lou opened his own garage when he was 25. Then another, then a couple of more in neighboring towns. He wasn’t even fixing cars anymore, just working in the office, doing the books, planning expansion. He’d married the most beautiful girl in town, had a couple of kids, and owned a giant house and a boat and took vacations all over the world. 

Out of nowhere, things fell apart. One of the stores had a manager skimming big time and Lou had to close that branch. Then he found out Candace was cheating on him, and in the divorce, he lost half of everything, had to liquidate, selling the two new stores. He started drinking and then using and before long, he was fixing cars again in his one remaining garage, having to lay off the mechanics. He also lived in the office, nowhere else to go. Even that didn’t last long. He lost everything by 28.

Lou moved into my spare bedroom and admitted he was still trying to kick the drugs. And by kick, he meant he didn’t have the money so there was no way to pay for them. I researched local NA meetings and printed stuff out and left it on the coffee table. 

I came home from work and all my shit was gone, the TV, my stereo, the microwave, even the couches. I filed a police report, mostly to get the cops on finding him, and they did, two days later, in a motel room, ODed on the floor. I met Lou at the hospital. He’d live. The officer wanted to know if I still wanted to press charges and I said no. I asked if they found anything in the room, anything of mine, like maybe my TV. The cop laughed, then apologized for laughing. “OxyContin,” he said. “We found a lot of OxyContin.”

~

Lou moved back in with me. He was in a chair because he fucked up his liver and for some reason that meant he couldn’t walk. I was still mad about my stuff but glad he wasn’t dead. My parents had cut him off. A few times, his kids came over, my nephews, but with a court officer, and only for an hour. They clearly didn’t want to be there. They’d liked me before, called me Uncle Rickey, but now, by extension, they hated me, too.

Lou and I watched my new TV and he joked about carrying it out, in his lap in his chair, when I went to work. I’d reply, “Make sure you finish the job this time, or I will.” 

We watched the Pirates movies and the National Treasures movies and I tried to get him into Stranger Things, but he didn’t like it. We watched basketball because it was early in the year, then baseball.

“I used to catch, you know,” Lou would say.

“I remember.”

“I was good. All-star every year.”

“Every year.”

Lou talked about the Little League World Series team, beating Provo, Utah, in the first round then getting smoked by Appleton, Wisconsin, next, ending their run. 

“I can’t believe those cheeseheads lost to the Chinese,” he said. “Ten zip. Why aren’t there Chinese baseball leagues, or players in MLB, like from Japan? What happened?”

“I don’t know, Lou. Communism?”

“Yeah. Probably that. Communism.”

I always thought from there Lou would go into the story about getting cut, that coach’s son, his raw deal. He never did. It might have been because his brain was fried. Maybe it was too painful to remember.

One time, when he started in, I said, “Yeah. You would have made it if those assholes didn’t cut you.”

Lou rolled forward. “What’re you talking about?”

“You getting cut freshman year. Because the coach’s kid was a catcher and you’d make him look bad.”

Lou stared at me like he’d never seen me before. “That’s not what happened.”

Lou told me he didn’t play because he got caught smoking a joint in the men’s room by the cafeteria. Zero-tolerance policy. He couldn’t even try out. I was misremembering.

“No, you got cut.”

“I was a pothead.”

Third inning, the catcher, Contreras, came up, drove one into the gap.

Lou said, “All right. Leadoff man on. Let’s bring him home.”

Contreras took his lead off second, the pitcher glancing back.

“That could have been you, Lou,” I said, pointing. “You would’ve been great.”