The game was a pitching duel, a shutout on both sides until the late innings. We were on edge, waiting for a team to break through with a hit, two hits in a row. Lincecum was flawless. Cliff Lee seemed so too, until Ross and Uribe stacked up hits, Huff moved them up with the surprise bunt, Burrell whiffed (again!) and then Renteria hit a ball that looked for a breathless moment like it might drop in the field and turn into a pop fly. But it didn't. It slipped between the first row of the bleachers and the center field fence. A perfect clutch home run. We all lost our shit. The bar erupted. I leapt up on the footrest of my barstool and almost tipped myself face-first into the guacamole, screaming with my arms over my head. "That's the World Series! That won the World Series!" I said.
Two innings later Wilson closed it out. Hamilton struck out looking at a sick breaking ball; Guerrero grounded out. Wilson built up the count to 3-2 with Nelson Cruz. We waited. The next pitch: fouled back. The next one. No one dared to breathe. Nelson stepped in with a huge swing. And - he missed!
I must have stepped through a worm hole or something because it felt like I lost about five seconds. I blacked out after the last pitch and came back to find myself screaming, jumping up and down on the peanut shells underfoot, screaming and screaming with a hundred and fifty people in the bar. It was like we were locked up in a champagne bottle and and then Brian Wilson popped the cork and we just blew up and spilled over. I peed in my pants, only a little bit, I just couldn't control myself. We were just making sounds, not even words or "Yeah!!" but "AGHHHHHHHHH!" R. and I bear-hugged, then threw our heads back and jumped up and down screaming "AGHHHH!!!!!" in unison. We broke off, stepped back, double high-fived, did the same with the people around us, and then went back to jumping up and down and screaming. I even gave the woman with the talking problem a two-handed high five. We cut loose, I mean literally, physically; R. said later, "I was just farting and peeing all over myself when they won."
Things subsided into a general din punctuated by occasional wooting crescendos, but after that petered out very quickly. Within about ten minutes the packed bar had half-cleared out. The Giants were dogpiling by the pitcher's mound in Rangers Ballpark. I bought vodka shots for me and R., because I didn't know what else to do. We seemed shell-shocked. We watched the Giants spraying each other with champagne, and the inaudible post-game interviews for a few more minutes, then drove back to R.'s house to watch the news.
I was still in a blissed-out daze on Wednesday morning when I woke up, so I decided to take a half day and get myself up to the ticker tape parade. What a trek: traffic on the highway to the commuter rail, thirty-person lines at ticket machines, lines to get into the station, lines to get out of the station, almost standstill shuffling in Civic Center Plaza. Took me almost an hour and a half to get there.
I didn't think the parade would be amazing, but I thought that something ceremonial would satisfy my psychological need for closure. What happened in the bar after Game 5 felt strange; twenty minutes after the spasm of victory, most people were gone. R. and I and a few strangers sat around a table beaming at each other, and up at the TV screens, but in the corner a few people had started shooting pool, the kitchen staff kept pushing out orders of fajitas de camaron, and the peanut shells went untrampled. It seemed to come down awfully quick. There weren't riots in Palo Alto. Nobody danced in the street and fell down drunk into a crowd of fans. I went over to R.'s and ate half a bag of kettle corn. Life just went on.
So I wanted a ritual. Plus I was curious. I wondered if people would be excessively polite and giddy in San Francisco the way they were in Grant Park the night Obama was elected. You know when you experience something intense and you want to be around people who feel the same way? How your private joy about a non-private event finds special meaning when it is shared by a hundred thousand people? Freud calls this the oceanic feeling. I'm into mob scenes, and San Francisco is a really fun place for a feel-good mass gathering. Maybe because of all the pot? Gay Pride, Dyke March, Dolores Park on a sunny Sunday - when it's good it's really good.
In the Daly City BART station, I stood in line behind a man named Norm. Norm had taken the bus from Half Moon Bay (a town on the Pacific about 40 miles south of San Francisco) to the BART. His trip by public transportation was going to take him more than two hours. Norm didn't understand how to use the ticket machines, so I bought him his ticket with my credit card when I bought mine. He seemed really happy about this. We sat next to each other for half an hour on the train and chatted about his Ty Cobb impersonation, the VA Hospital where he was going to get his eye fixed, how he worked up from a menial job at a photography agency and became a photographer himself. I told him about my girlfriend in New York; he was from New York, too!
(Norm.)
We stuck together and split up when the throngs exiting the station pushed us apart. I shouted "Goodbye and good luck!" over my shoulder and ascended to the street.
(Norm in the crowd at Civic Center station.)The event itself was kind of a crowded mess. It was clear that the city had only had one day to plan. There were no speakers or projection screens, so basically if you weren't seven feet tall or hadn't started lining the parade route at 8 a.m., there was no chance for you to catch any of the action. No bathrooms or vendors or water, either.
(The crowd at Civic Center Plaza.)People climbed whatever they could. Crowds of people gathered on the public bathrooms. I saw about twenty on a big white van.
During the World Series, I would tell anyone within earshot that the Giants were superior as a team not only because their players were scruffy nonconformists who seemed to love each other but also because their fan base is far more diverse than the monochromatic crowds in Arlington, Texas. Seriously, in the pans of Rangers Ballpark, the only people of color you'd see were Giants fans. Watching that made me feel like a female executive must feel walking into a meeting filled with men, or a Jewish person must feel in a supermarket where everybody has a little Hitler mustache. This coupled with the alarming habit in some ballparks of putting up "K"s whenever a pitcher gets a strikeout - do they realize that it says "KKK" all over their stadium?? I was so happy that that kid dressed up in a bright red full-body crab costume (in homage to San Francisco seafood, I think) sideways-walking around the ballpark after Game 5 was Asian. I cannot understate the importance of this.
I don't mean to sound triumphalist. All I mean to say is that on Wednesday I was as interested in the people around me as I was in trying to catch a glimpse at my favorite ballplayers. I took a bunch of photos with this fancy new camera I bought last week.
(This kid is holding this man's ears like they're handles!)I don't mean to sound triumphalist. All I mean to say is that on Wednesday I was as interested in the people around me as I was in trying to catch a glimpse at my favorite ballplayers. I took a bunch of photos with this fancy new camera I bought last week.
(It can't be all feel-good. This tattoo captures everything that is wrong with San Francisco. No taste. So tacky.)
I stood in a throng on Larkin Street and roasted (80 degrees in the city?!) for an hour, getting a glimpse of (I think) Cody Ross's arm, and the backs of lots of people's heads, but not much else.
I don't know if I found the oceanic feeling. The mood was mixed. People were getting irritated at the heat, the crowd, and the invisibility of the hometown heroes. I freaked out because the cell towers were all clogged up from the crowd and I got a work email 45 minutes after it had been sent. Even so, when Tim Lincecum's bus passed on McAllister, giving us a split-second look at our long-haired super Freak, we all cheered him like a champ.
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I used to be one of those nerdy, sarcastic adolescents who derided sports as frivolous and athletes as overpaid meatheads. This despite my fascination with the World Series-winning A's team of 1989 and the Superbowl-winning 49ers team of 1995! First sports was just baffling: I just didn't get how my seventh grade homeroom teacher could chat it up with a twelve year-old boy at 7:45 a.m. on a Tuesday about how a team that wins over 100 games per season should make it to the postseason no matter the standings. Then it became contemptible: only 39% of Americans believe in evolution, 65% don't show up for midterm elections, one in four read no books, and you're wasting time on rich men playing with balls???
I recently hung out with Matt, a friend who grew up down the block. I was a year ahead of him in school, so I supervised his work on the high school newspaper, and I always felt that because of that, he respected my opinion more than it deserved. I haven't seen him for maybe a decade. Making idle chat with him on a walk around Stanford campus about two months ago, I asked him what his recent trip to San Diego had been like. He said it had been "nice." Then he self-corrected: "Oh God, 'nice.' What an insipid thing to say. San Diego wasn't just nice."
I couldn't help but feel that this was some sort of performance for me. Back when I knew Matt, I think I was the kind of person who'd judge a description of something as "nice" as insipid, just as I would judge sports fans as mindless consumers. What a snot I was! I wanted to hug Matt and apologize for the person I had been. I mean who knows, maybe he really thought "nice" didn't capture what he wanted to express about San Diego and it had nothing to do with me, but nonetheless I read the whole situation as an indictment of my adolescent snobbery.
Hold on, I have to stop myself from going where this writing is going. Who am I fooling, writing this narrative of enlightenment, as if I have gone from snob to loving, nonjudgmental Buddha. Nope - still a snob, also a hypocrite. I still think people are empty-headed cabbages for preferring mindless entertainment to reading and voting; it's just now I also happen to enjoy that mindless entertainment. It used to be that I liked country music because I found it comically conservative but now I think I really like comically conservative country music OH GOD it's hard to be a guilty, neurotic bitch! What the fuck am I saying? I can't really just enjoy something - I have to stay alert, observe other people's faces, question the social implications and politics of their pleasure and mine, and basically just con myself out of a good time. What rapture I have is secretive and rare. Ask my exes.
Eh. So thank you, Giants, for letting me jump up and down and scream with my best friend in a bar full of jumping, screaming people. It felt so foreign that I had to describe it above as "passing out" - like an out-of-body, out-of-consciousness experience. But really it was just happiness. For that moment. Unfiltered, unquestioned happiness. Thank you.
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Sorry for this upchuck of a blogpost. You see my brain is actually just scrambled egg whites, high in protein, low in fat, nutritionally superior to whole eggs but still just a mess of shit on a plate. HIRE ME, EMPLOYERS.
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Another thing I am grateful to the Giants for is the excuse they gave me to spend time with beloved people:
- May 14 regular season game at the stadium. R. and C. and I took Caltrain up and met O. and N. Spent 2 1/3 innings walking around looking for hot dogs and garlic fries and admiring N.'s toe cleavage, and most of the game checked out of the action on the field. A view of the water and the shipping containers all the way over on the Oakland side of the bay. R. and C. and I took the train home with the entire Palo Alto Swim Club boy's team, about two dozen white, Asian, and hapa kids with skin browned to almost the same color as their chlorine-lightened hair.
- Game 4 of the NLDS. Came down from my office to watch half an inning with my colleagues in the lunch room. Beloved partner P. looked bemused and said, "Do you follow baseball?" This warm beam of attention alone made the entire baseball season worthwhile.
- Game 2 of the NLCS. Went to W.'s house in Fremont with O. He cooked balut and fried fish for us while we watched the Giants implode. They lost 6-1. My very first balut was tasty! No little duck beak or face or bones, as I had feared, and only a savory, brothy flavor with a hard cap of egg white and a slightly veinier, tougher yolk.
- Game 5 of the NLCS. Met chatty Cathy and her less chatty friends at Antonio's Nut House. Beer, peanuts, baseball, and solitude (+ Cathy) = nice.
- Game 1 of the World Series. Met R. at her house, where she had been waiting for two hours to start watching the game. She came to the door going, "Wheee!!!!!" and clapping her hands in excitement. C. successfully stayed awake for the entire game. R.'s fitness challenge for the game was to do 10 burpees per run scored. Most Giants games this season have been low-scoring games, 3-2, 1-0, etc. World Series Game 1 ended with the score at 11-7, so . . . R. did 180 burpees! My fitness challenge was eating Cheetos.
- Game 2 of the World Series. R. and C. and I went back to Antonio's Nut House. Chatty Cathy and her crew were there; I waved. We grabbed seats in the front and watched the Giants dismantle the Rangers. R. and I made orange pom-poms with the yarn from a discarded knitting project - a wedding blanket for me, but the marriage ended before the knitting did, ehhhh, so we turned the yarn into rally poms. We also wore our matching Brian Wilson beards, which we'd picked up a few days before at a Halloween store where a California stoner dude had asked us in his low, druggy voice, "So, uhh . . . where you guys get those beards at?" We pointed him to the beards aisle.
- Game 3 of the World Series, Finnerty's in Manhattan. R.M. and R.T. met me at this densely packed bar. Poor R.T., trying to read her Stephanie Meyer novel on her iPhone while meatheads pushed past her to get to the bar. Eventually she succumbed to the television and R.M. and I took turns explaining to her the rules of the game. Met R.M.'s friendly Fresno folks, observed some people flirting, listened to some idiots behind me talking loudly about girls with fake boobs.
- Game 4 of the World Series, Pacific Station in Brooklyn with S., who tried to escape her baseball-watching duties by eating her pre-game baigan bharta very slowly. Found seats on a bed buggy couch next to a man in a Buster Posey jersey reading Foucault. S.'s initial irritation at her girlfriendly obligation turned into mild interest in the game. Tried to teach her about pitches but I couldn't get clear in my head the difference between a breaking ball, a cutter, and a slider. We made out in the corner between innings, and left when it was clear that the Giants would win. Sorry for writing that, but I'm really proud of the fact that you will make out with me!!!
- Game 5, as described above.
I congratulate you on making it to the end of this post, though I question your judgment and your interest in mindless entertainment in the form of reading some lezzie's blog. Please send your mailing address to me. To express my gratitude for your patronage, I will mail you a Giants snuggie. Go team.
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