His name was Mike.
We were on the same little league baseball team. Baseball may have been the single worst sport I have, or ever will, play. I was absolutely horrible. Looking back, I think it had something to do with my lack of focus or attention on anything for longer than any given time. Unless I was utterly enthralled in the task at hand, my mind floated away, which is not very helpful when you have a solid, leather bound ball screaming towards you repeatedly throughout a few hours.
I was the token space case on the team. It was the Dover Elks Lodge, which made my mother quite proud. Her father, my grandfather, had been a proud member of the Elks Lodge for a great part of his life, before he passed away in my first of third grade years. I would not be surprised if she believes that her father was up there in that heaven of his, fishing in a pond with the God almighty himself, stuffing sugar covered jelly donuts in his mouth by the dozen (remember...in heaven there's no calorie counting...), and politely asked the guy to let me be on his pride and joy's team. Even how little I can remember him, I can picture this going on, him with his amazing talent at showcasing an unavoidable puppy dog look, something which skipped a generation, in my mom, and was handed straight down to me. However, the puppy dog look was given an added twitch of both sarcasm and hostility when it landed in my lap, which ends up giving me a slightly frantic and urgent look.
I'll make the baseball stories quick. There's not much to tell, other than my pure hatred of playing. It wasn't that I hated the game itself, however. It was my void of any talent whatsoever that pushed me over the edge. I dreaded going to practice. I found myself getting panic attacks each and every game, which garnered mixed results such as pissing myself while playing third base, which happened on two seperate occasions. I disguised it well and I don't think anyone even noticed because I always made sure my pants were nice and dirty by the second or third inning. I would strike out and bury myself back in the clubhouse, wanting to break down and go home.
My father, the supportive parent that he was, was constantly encouraging me, trying to provide any comfort he possibly could to make sure I knew he was still proud of me. For two of those wretched seasons, he was an assistant coach on the team, trying to make it to a practice or game whenever his oppressive work schedule permitted. I don't think he found the time to be there because of his love for the game, though he did have a passion for it. No, I think he was there because my dad, from a very early age of my life, started to notice that I was a bit on the fragile side. I think he saw how much I struggled to be a normal kid and, though he never said it, wanted to be there in case I finally had my impending breakdown.
The moment I had played my last game of little league baseball, I took of that glove and buried it deep in my bedroom closet, knowing that I'd never need it again. I went back to enjoying the game as a spectator and didn't regret it in the least. A few years later I went to some batting cages to remind myself how much I really did suck, and it only took about seven swings before the task at hand was accomplished.
His name was Mike, and he was on that Dover Elks Lodge team. He was one of the only kids on the team I made a slight effort in communicating with, and he seemed to enjoy me. We were in the same grade, so as I started junior high, we were finally in the same school. We hung out a bit, seeing as we knew each other well enough to do so, and on his end, I think he needed to know he had some friends in the new environment we were all thrown into. He had an older sister that took us to the high school football games on friday nights, where we would spend the time half paying attention to the game and the other half looking for other kids we went to school with to hang out for a few hours.
We'd sit at the same table at lunch, which was a relief to me on that first day of school. The cafeteria is a little piece of hell in it's ownright. You walk in there and wonder who your friends are going to be, who's going to let you sit at their table and welcome you. Years later I found the glory in sitting by yourself while there. Some time around a month into that seventh grade year, Mike stopped sitting at the table, opting to sit with other school friends he had made. We still hung out on occasion, but more times than not as the weeks progressed, Mike would cancel our after school plans, always having something else to do. A few weeks later, he started to forget he knew me.
Weeks after that, we had somehow turned into enemies. I don't think there's ever a way to figure out when a lot of things start to go south in a friendship, especially at that age. It just happened. We would walk past each other in the hallway, and he'd always have some verbal bullets to shoot out. This was before I found my venom tongue, so most of the time I would just look at him in a disgusted confusion, not sure how things had got to that point. It went on for months, until one day I wasn't in the mood to hear anything come out of him. He opened his mouth and I pushed him into a wall and shouted something like, "This ends now....". It had no authority behind it. It was all the effort I wanted to put into the situation, already tired of trying to figure out how friendships were supposed to work and how come they fall apart so quickly. Mike just curled up his lips into an obnoxious little grin and pushed me back, knowing he'd finally gotten me to break from my apathetic demeanor. A teacher seperated the short lived scuffle before anything escalated.
From that day on, Mike made no effort to mess with me in the hallway. I'd love to say it was my forceful nature, that I intimidated him from the moment I put my hands on him and backed him into that wall. I'd love to say that, back then, I had already figured out how to ruin a life and silence the assholes. But, truth be told, I don't think he ever messed with me again because another friend of mine, also named MIke, heard that he was messing with me that day, and knocked him out in the middle of a classroom.
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