The Unnatural *Wattpad Featured Story*

Chapter 14

The next day at practice, ESPN wants to talk to me again. So does Sports Illustrated, Fox Sports, and Kansas City local TV news. Toronto fans hang over the railing to ask for my autograph, including more than a few attractive young women. My crazy home run has drawn attention to my hot streak. I try to accommodate as many as possible before I need to start infield drills.

Coach Nash seems unaffected by my heroics the night before. He bores in on my fielding weaknesses and continued to patiently refine my footwork. Around the batting cage, I notice that every hitter on the team has switched out their batting gloves for Easton Turbo Slot IIIs. Heck, even Bennie Salas is using them, and he's never worn a batting glove in his life. Raul has replaced his Mizuno with a new Rawlings catcher's mitt. Eric Fluke wanders around the clubhouse without a stitch of clothing just before the game. He'd fallen asleep on the trainer's table yesterday and didn't bother to dress until the 4th inning. Even though he didn't play yesterday, he clearly intends to follow the same routine today.

The whole thing freaks me out. I'm not exactly sure how to react, so I pretend I don't notice. Vic, however, doesn't cooperate. He finds a moment with no one else in earshot and whispers, "It's a good thing they don't know that you wear extra-small Trojans. Or else, we'd have a gangrene epidemic."

Vic's joke is stupid, crude, and not really that funny. I can't help but laugh. The image of every guy in our locker room castrating themselves in a lemming-like exercise of monkey-see, monkey-do, cracks me up.

We sweep our three-game series in Toronto. We fly to Baltimore early Thursday in the AM. This series is something of a homecoming for me. Both my parents and Vic's parents live in Bethesda, which is less than an hour's drive from Baltimore. Ashley is in Fredrick, slogging through her spring-semester finals at Hood

I rent a Nissan Sentra and drive out to my parent's house early the next morning. They were, of course, coming to all three games, but I want to see them away from the baseball diamond. It's the only way I can sort out my feelings about them without the cult of the baseball hero obscuring the truth.

I haven't forgiven them for my childhood.

I pull up in front of their three-story colonial home with a brick-faced facade and a row of white pillars in the front. I didn't grow up in this house. They bought it six years ago, two years after I'd graduated from high school. Before I left home, we hadn't lived anything like this. We had traipsed through a series of low-rent apartments because my absent-minded father couldn't keep a job. Every time he joined a new construction crew, things would be fine for a little while. But, eventually, he'd make a mistake that would get him fired: like leaving the engine running on a bulldozer when he took a lunch break and watching as it plowed into a frame for a new strip mall. Or only securing one end of a stack of beams because he got distracted by an order from his foreman, causing them to crash into the floor below when lifted by a crane at a condo site.

One year my Dad lost his job two weeks before Christmas. After another late-night screaming match, my mother posted a row of his termination notices on the refrigerator over my futile "wish list." There was more than a dozen of the angry pink letters. I think I was eleven.

On Christmas Eve, my mother hurled an empty one-liter bottle of Everclear against the living room wall and passed out on the sofa. Instead of opening presents, I spent my Christmas morning cleaning up broken glass. They separated in mid-January, but Dad moved back in a year-and-half later.

To this day, I don't know what kept them coming back to one another.

They chugged along until my junior year of high school when my Dad started coming to my baseball games, probably due to the novelty of being able to enjoy vicarious success rather than grinding failure. He drank too much while celebrating our district championship and told his tale of woe to one of the other parents who happened to be a psychiatrist.

She wrote him a script for Aventryl and told him to make an appointment. She diagnosed him with A.D.D. complicated by major depression. That fall, another parent gave him a chance at a job selling construction equipment. At the age of 37, my father began to succeed in the workplace for the first time in his life.

Robbie was born my freshman year at Tulane, and they bought the house on Donovan Court the fall after I finished my rookie league season with the Braves.

I walk into the living room of my parents' house and immediately see the "Jordan" shrine they've erected over the mantelpiece. A portrait of me dominates the center, flanked by pictures of me starting as a baby and ending with recent images of me playing for the Jesters. The ball I'd given to Robbie stood in the center of the mantle, mounted on a columnar stand surrounded by various trophies I won playing youth baseball.

I look around their luxurious home, which is completely alien to me. My Dad has fixed his health, re-established his career, and rebuilt his marriage. Now, he's trying to repair his relationship with me. However, he can't make up for my childhood. Those days have already been lived.

I ask, "Where's Robbie?"

Mom replies, "He's in school."

I don't know what else to say. Robbie might be the only thing we have in common at this point.

I don't know why, but it suddenly occurs to me that my father must have been a little bit like Loog. People who regularly fail are treated very poorly by their bosses, their co-workers, and their customers―all of whom care little about the possible impact abuse has on the target. I wonder how much of what happened inside our four walls occurred because my father couldn't cope with failure he didn't understand.

My Dad asks, "Jordy, could you get us three more tickets for tomorrow's game? A friend of mine from work wants to come along, and he wants to bring his two sons. They go to school with Robbie."

In all the years that I spent growing up, I never once remembered my father socializing with a friend from work.

Maybe he didn't have any.

I think of all the friends I've made playing ball from high school, college, and the minors. I think of the locker room that follows my every move. I think of the ballpark and how its immediate results entice us to make clear what normally we disguise: the camaraderie of victory, but also the scapegoating fueled by defeat.

What happens when you lose all the time?

I think about the 10-game losing streak we suffered through to begin the season. I think about the desperation, despair, and erratic behavior that filled our locker room. And then I extrapolate that atmosphere over a lifetime.

For the first time in my life, I feel sorry for my Dad.

I look at my father and say, "Sure, Dad. I can do that."

I still haven't forgiven them. That's going to take some time. But I've taken the first step along that path.

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Next Chapter: Jordan plays his first game at Camden Yards