Love is just like a baseball game
Three strikes you’re out
Whether you win or lose
Love is just like a baseball game
Three strikes you’re out
Everybody’s got to pay some due
You got to pay some due – The Intruders, 1968
My great grandmother only really watched WWF wrestling and Major League Baseball when I was a kid when it came to sports. She would sit back, especially during summer A’s games, either in the stands or in front of the TV and watch, almost in rhapsody and ultimate relaxation the 9 innings of push & pull between the teams. Would the pitcher pass a fast or curve ball through the batter and land the fire of his throw in the catcher’s mitt? Would the batter send the ball flying into the outfield or beyond?
She’d sit back and smile as the beer, hidden at least at home, in a lime green plastic cup relaxed her nerves. The Bufferin probably popped probably provided its own punch. This heady combination must have kicked in. I’ve retroactively wondered much more about the nuance of the spectacle of the sport and what brings the observer fascination with what, other than golf, can be the sport most like watching paint dry.
It would be years before I would understand all the nuances, vulnerable truths and delights between the polarities of tension and release. These were the summers I wasn’t in Montessori preschool or on break from Catholic school. I’d rarely fully sit still for those at minimum 9 innings to really get the point. Older I get, the more I understand that there was sublime delight in watching others play a game that symbolized despite how often we put in the effort, things don’t always work out. I didn’t understand quite yet the beauty of form, practice, repetition and training that would lead to celebration with those that play ‘switch’ with you. I didn’t get really the meaning to truly ‘root for the home team.’
Granted I did early on practice and still do, the beauty of form, practice, repetition and training you can do alone. I’ve been more the cross country running type, however. It was more the lesson I was schooled to believe in. I tutored myself mostly on long distance endurance. The more miles you can run without exhaustion, the better the results for the home team you find yourself on. The reality of that particular athletic training is you find yourself so far from home base. You have to eventually complete the loop to make it back home on your own capacity and resources. A baseball diamond is so much more concise. It has more breaks and pit stops that allow you to relax, relate and release with those you’re working towards a goal with.
It’s hilarious in that bit of foreshadowing I’ve been doing lately that I pulled that quote from that first season of Bewitched a few weeks ago. I’ve been more likely to be Endora deriding the point of Baseball. This is comical given Baseball itself is one of the few sports I can bother giving some sort of attention to. Like football, wrestling, swimming, track & field, I’ll be honest, adult and amorous about why any sport catches my interest. The uniforms that often highlight the physical form. This aesthetic pleasuring can prompt some desires to the point of fantasy crafting. Some of those uniforms and some of the moves you need to do with some of them are downright arousing of more than mere visual attention.
I knew in a childish sense then that my Great Grandmother, sleeping in the bedroom down the hall from her husband, didn’t really have love of a tender type in her life by her early 60s. I can reason now that her various back surgeries that happened post retirement possibly made it impossible to physically execute sexual intimacy with a partner without remarkable discomfort. Baseball games could have been a socially acceptable masturbation fantasy given she couldn’t hoist herself on a warm vibrating Kenmore dryer in the garage anymore.
Even back then there’s was the knowledge of my step grandfather’s alcoholism as well. That could have been ‘strike two’ that lead to them sleeping in separate bedrooms. There’s darker reasons why there might have been a ‘strike three.’ I’m more prone to say that one one to one than cement in my writing just yet. There’s so many dark compromises we make to sustain our place in the game of life. Living without love until you die because of someone else’s misdeeds is one of the worst ways to strike out. Those afternoons seeing wrestlers tussle with each other until the point of submission, of winning, of release may have been enough fantasy material for her to feel something that she couldn’t readily access anymore.
Granted I watched my peers in high school accidentally (or not) slip a finger between the cheeks of who they were trying to assert dominance over. Never mind the oft tumescent tribute to the sport being sprouted often by both participants. That friction of who would let go in exhaustion lead to an exciting rush for both. I never tried out for wrestling cause I had seen enough porn by high school. You weren’t gonna pin me down, or I wasn’t gonna pin you down, with all that developed tension to have it stop there. Something would have happened in the locker room. It would be improper to the roles we play in this society to claim the prize I’d REALLY want after putting in that much effort either way.
The same tension underlies my relationship with baseball. I couldn’t see tensing my body up and releasing either a pitch or a swing, then pumping my adrenaline up to run in a bunch of directions either to ‘slide into home’ or catch a flying hardball. It’s all too exciting either way. Add in the fact that it almost always bring you close to at least one teammate up to 26? I’m not keen on group fun. I enjoy mostly one to one time. I can truly be coached into, convinced of the pleasure of joining in the fun with multiple others I’ve built intimacy with otherwise tho. I look back at those hazy as old school Los Angeles smog Newport smoke and lays chip supplied random afternoons with Grandma Clara and wonder if baseball and wrestling were my earliest form of sex education. I’ve had an ever increasing appreciation for a determined man with a nice ass ever since.
I only played flag football in P.E. for the possibility that it gave me a perfect excuse to touch the other boys in ways that weren’t acceptable outside of the confines of sports. I was bad at everything but track-field and tennis. I might have some grumblings that I never was all that good at everything else athletically sanctioned by most high schools. I’ll love cycling ‘til I die. Other than driving some cars, it’s the closest I’ve ever felt to flying. How I’ve honestly wished, when I’ve been in a group of cyclists that I wished some I’ve gotten to know that I was the seat on their bicycle. Given it is almost routine at this stage for the thrust of takeoff on a Southwest or Jet Blue flight gives that delightful thrust in my pelvis, I’ve wondered how more earthbound forms of movement might lead to pleasure for years.
I haven’t been asked to be put in by a coach much. Too often I’ve found myself coaching even though I’ve only learned what I can from mostly observation, not practice. This often means I’ve been horrible at selecting teammates. I’ve only gotten the hint when someone has chosen over and over again to stand right next to me. I’m too shy to ask if I could try out. I’ve spent so much time practicing in solitude. I’ve done myself such a disservice. I didn’t know how often I’ve been hurting others by affecting a sense of refined disinterest in being chosen to be next up for bat. I’ve been outright called a snob when realistically I just want an opportunity to make you happy with the skills I’ve been working on by myself.
I perhaps jumped too excitedly when Jordan said he had an extra ticket to the season opener of The Oakland Ballers Game. This Pioneers league team fills a vacancy left by the fact that Oakland, a city of around 450,000 people, retains none of the former Major League sports teams that used to take up residence at the Oakland Coliseum anymore. We’ve lost the Raiders twice to elsewhere. The Warriors never seemed fully committed to Oakland, always branding themselves as Golden State despite the sparkling of gold on the coliseum arena during afternoon sunset. The A’s demanded a new ballpark that would have been an even stronger displacement agent that would have fully erased the ‘Harlem of the West’ element of West Oakland.
7th Street has been a corpse ever since the south side of the street businesses were bulldozed for the overhead BART tracks as the 1960’s gave way to the 1970’s. It made me feel alive to be chosen to share an evening that reminded me of a beloved childhood ritual that matures still into adulthood. These days are quickly starting to rush towards this inevitable departure. Too many understand and encourage that I do it. It comes into focus that someone wanted to do something with me. Someone called me off the bench for the last inning. Deep down that made me feel like I still belonged here. It isn’t the ‘Bernie Lean’ days where I too got swept up in the swell of excitement that Oakland would once again be the crown of the Major League Baseball world, but it is something remarkably sweet and tender.
I’m 14 years and a week older than Jordan.
We laugh and joke constantly about the heaven and hell two Geminis can cause ourselves and the world around us just being ourselves.
I remember that the Loma Prieta Earthquake couldn’t stop the train of the A’s whooping the Giants ass in a 4 game sweep. That year I refused to go back to school for a few weeks, informed by a series of aftershocks. The Catholic school I went to resembled my childhood home with its floor to ceiling glass walls to the left of the classrooms. I could barely sleep in the house. I brattily bartered for the comfort of watching the battle of the Bay with my great grandmother over doing homework. Oakland may have had a graveyard in the ill-conceived and ‘Negro Removal’ orientated Cypress Freeway in the Fall of 1989, but Oakland won that battle of the Bay.
This era in Oakland gave us Festival At The Lake, Tony! Toni! Toné! MC Hammer having hits and a damn cartoon, En Vogue and Oaktown 3-5-7 reminding us that realistically “Juicy Gotcha Krazy.” There’s so many wild instances where I’m like have we always been singing about creaming? This was Oakland my aunt Stephanie would take me to to chase for her next baby daddy. This was the Oakland where my mom’s boss (who was having an affair with my cousin Carl) would take me to have Creole food at the Ginger Bread House. East Palo Alto, Menlo Park and Redwood City were for those Black folks trying to attach themselves to white normativity. There was possibility of something else between the bay flats that rose up to the Caldecott Tunnel.
The white adjacency was the ironic push for my Creole and secretly Jewish father and my color struck mother. They had been trained, despite the perils and heartbreak it caused before to continue the pursuit of blending into the ‘melting pot.’ Luckily others had other plans for me. Luckily I was probably already seen as not cut out for heterosexuality. I was shown the more pleasurable fringes of it to queer the trajectory more. I was subversively shown that there was more than “Morning In America” suburbia. The draw of good food, good music and good sex were too intoxicating to ignore even before I understood or was capable of enjoying the last one. Every longing that was locked up in my great grandmother’s tortured body because she chose to move directly to the suburbs, to California in general, from Birmingham could be unlocked, fortified and preserved by a little bit of time a little further east, a lot sunnier and warmer than in “Baghdad by The Bay.”
Oakland was the more fulfilling, nurturing, bigger and more vibrant place to be “Black” in California over anywhere else on the west coast. I was being mostly trained to accept that restrained, constrained white picket fence, ‘Somewhere That’s Green’ suburbia was the pinnacle of what life could be. Yet I felt the heaviness and ache for something deeper, something more with the in-crowd in my Great Grandmother’s smoke filled den in front of that television. I didn’t get how much her body had become a prison instead of a palace of pleasure because she traded it for Chryslers and suburban comfort working under the thumb of perfection that’s the byproduct of idealized California conformity.
Once-Upon-A-Time Oakland of rapidly approaching 40 years ago had the braggadocio that it was still more culturally productive in the sense of the larger cultural zeitgeist than San Francisco. I can’t remember any cultural artifacts other than Hollywood movies that made San Francisco seem like the ‘better’ place to be. The most prominent one I can think of that had a resonating impact at the time for me was Ms. Doubtfire. The themes of hapless, childish husband not dealing with his shadows throwing sparks against a upwardly mobile and determined to be capitalistically successful wife rang too true as my mother filed for divorce only 2 months before that movie premiered.
I’ve never looked at Pacific Heights as a place I ever wanted to call home.
Thankfully, my dad didn’t do drag to keep access to the kid, but whew did he do some other remarkably dubious shit. Despite what ‘urban renewal’ tried to do to “The Town,” The art that it produced was more often home grown and as warm as the sun that graces the Eastern shores of the Bay Area to a more consistent degree than the city perpetually shrouded in fog. Sometimes I wonder if it is a natural phenomenon of the cold Pacific or the humidity of tears from all the failed talentless artists that failed out of New York. They themselves make the vapors of hope that they seem creative actually creates the murkiness of the ground hugging clouds.
I didn’t fully understand that Jordan saw me as a link to a little bit beyond the Oakland he’s known in his soon to be 30 years of life on earth. I said yesterday we’ve had a few arguments where I said he didn’t know such and such because of his relative youth. He’s told me that there’s shit I didn’t get despite my longer time drawing oxygen out of the atmosphere. We’ve both been right and wrong yet still love each other over 7 years of delight and sometimes conflict. It’s a real relationship. I’m rapidly realizing that here is where I’m pulling many band-aids off wounds that quite often aren’t either of our faults, but the fault of this stupid stratified society.
He’s had the blessing of being of Oakland by birth, proceeded by a few generations of ancestors that wisely chose to stay in the blessing that was literally the only region of safety for Black folks on the West Coast spanning back to the days when the only jobs available to Black folks in the west were Pullman Porters and Domestics in white households. All relationships are mirrors. We met each other virtually in housing activism spaces either 6 or 7 years ago. COVID makes a lot of the concepts of time fuzzy. I’m willing to put $5 on it that we both were hoping that being in community organizing spaces, we’d hope we’d be holding onto something. There was hope that we were perhaps preserving, hopefully making more renewal for spaces for the kaleidoscope of the rich Oakland that informs the delightful humans I’m willing to brag on the town making us both to be.
Then I look at the images from May 19, 2026 that I took…
I look at the crowd. I look at who in particular we sat next to because we’re on the fringes of a social group. I realize in the intensity of West Oakland, 2 blocks from the 16th Street Terminal decommissioned almost as long as Jordan has been alive, we were a few specs of pepper in a sea of salt last Tuesday. I’ve been disillusioned that the Oakland that made me richer than the confines of East Palo Alto always was is in a terminal decline of rigidly square, poorly constructed ‘luxury’ apartments and condominiums.
It was clear before I left in 2018 to foolishly follow some twink trying to vampirically siphon my love of photography and vinyl for their own place further high up the social hierarchy than his middle class property owning position had him already. It aligned with my mother’s wishes that I’d eventually marry a (not Jewish) white man and have some ‘good hair’ babies via a surrogate or some laughable hope that I was bisexual and did it the ‘natural’ way.
It was clear upon my return in 2019 I hoped that if I had a chance to make home here one more time, it would be a different outcome. I’m no fool, I’m wise to recognize this country as a whole is still over 75% white if you recognize white of Hispanic origin is just people of Spaniard descent cosplaying as oppressed minorities. They’re the reason why so much of California has so few indigenous names on locations or the modified landscape follows so many unnatural pathways. Realistically all the housing and infrastructure that piles weight on the West Oakland flats shouldn’t exist in the first place. That’s why the hastily constructed Cypress Freeway collapsed in Loma Prieta. It’s why Loma Prieta as a mountain that the earthquake ruptured underneath is called a Spanish fucking name in the first place.
I’ve worked in DEI initiatives and watched Spaniards call themselves indigenous to get grant funding while taking the compliant seats at the table to gleefully re-establish the same systems of oppression and colonization. It seems that they take it as much as their birthright as Zionists do. A lot of the time it seems no different. I caused one of the largest frictions in my close relationships over the last 2 years by pointing it out to someone I chose to publicly, defiantly declare my solidarity with Palestine with.
They took the word of Spaniard weaponizing a ‘Puerto Rican’ identity that clearly couldn’t pass muster in New York City. It couldn’t pass the smell test against a plethora of other Puerto Ricans, clearly. I navigated in my DJing life the same social scene they did. I had a ‘cheat sheet’ to know which arts scenes held the biggest frauds. I wanted to protect someone I loved from losing all of their social currency.
Trust me, Rachel Dolezal was never the first and won’t be the last. I saw too honestly what that so-called solidarity with someone that was only out to serve themselves would cost them. I was the only one in the front row seat the night they needed an audience to turn out in their own search for belonging in that cold, cold fog shrouded city. I cry still at least once a day hoping they’d understand what it means to be ‘down for the town.’
But the town me and Jordan love really isn’t here anymore.
Just like The Oakland A’s are gone.
So are the Raiders.
So are the Warriors.
Do E-40 and Too Short still have Oakland Addresses?
Merritt Bakery died after how many scandalous fires that might have been insurance fraud schemes? Downtown is a ghost town even on Weekdays again. Broadway is no longer an auto row, but they could have done a better job architecturally with these high rises. There’s none of the art deco auto palace splendor on one of Oakland’s many main drags that used to sell Chevrolets built out on Bancroft ‘til the winter of ‘63 in the deep east anymore.
Oakland has become everything dreadful about San Francisco. San Francisco was a movie fantasia that sold boring white people from nowheresville middle America that if you couldn’t make it in New York, somehow you could be special if you hid your humanity, perhaps flaws through a natural filter. Granted, the “Golden Gate Push” always allowed for North Oakland, particularly Rockridge, for some white folks to anchor their delusions on the north side of town. It’s fortified by proximity to UC Berkeley. Academia is just as much a manufactured consent farm of marketable, classist conformity culture as any Hollywood studio.
I wonder if there’s shots of me and Jordan tooling around in Gracie together on someone’s iPhone. I always will pull some sort of documentation device to capture a pre-64 Corvair tooling the streets of Oakland. I’ll continue to wonder if it was made in the plant that used to be where Eastmont presides over the landscape as one of many dead malls in NorCal or America. I get that time changes everything, especially love. I think of the little known song I’m referencing that believes that by facing the truth of where you are, there’s hope that love will still grow and blossom into the most beautiful bouquet you can give to the world.
In the last week, me & Jordan have had to understand the underlying pain of feeling our pasts really solidly become our collective pasts. We both have expressed relief that Boots Riley gave us some vision for an optimistic, collective, communist and if you’re reading it for what it truly is, a queer future. I Love Boosters is beautiful in so many ways if you allow yourself to understand it. Somehow we both will win, we might all win.
For now we face the pain of separation.
I have to go.
He contributed to that GoFundMe that was such a stereotype of necessity of survival for elder millennials that find themselves ass out with life emergencies. He’s one of the few that has consistently stood by me as I crawled back from the brink of death. He understands, but is no less wounded that I have to choose the beauty of Philadelphia to keep on living another day.
He’s openly lamented that at some point that he might have to make the same-ish choice. I selfishly both hope that he never does. Yet out of some desire to hold onto the familiar in a new place, I hope that he does. My heart has broken so many times after some cardiologist diagnosed that it had been literally broken all along. I wonder if I’ve already lived 9 lives and the myth about cats is just not true. I can’t guarantee I’ll always land on my feet on this soil. There’s something horrific about looking over your shoulder at someone so full of promise yet you can’t guarantee that they’ll have it better, easier than you did.
There’s only so much I can say. There’s only so much I can do here. If the time comes, I need to have more space to make sure other cats have a happy landing. This gets more painful by the hour, this letting go. You feel every desire that was passed down to you that isn’t possible anymore pass as moisture out of your eyes. Crying is the softest way to release what’s painful, so I encourage all of us to cry more. When you release the pain, the signs around you of what’s possible become far more clear, concise and perhaps achievable. You’re gonna need people, people need people, and as ironically stirred by Martha Reeves 5 days before, those are the luckiest people in the world.
Sing a little gospel with me, won’t you?
Then John came in the ninth inning
And the game was almost done
Then God gave John a vision
And he knew we’d already wonYes you know life is a ball game
Being played each day
You know life is a ball game
Each and everybody can playYes you know, Jesus is standing at the home plate
He is waiting for you there
Well you know, life is a ball game
But you’ve got to play it fair…Wynona Carr, “The Ball Game” (1952)
Love will see us through the tough moments we find ourselves in.
Make sure you’re living a life that prompts you to create rich love letters to those you love.
