I didn't know it at the time, and neither did anyone else on the team, but I grew up at the end of an era. That same summer--for me, eighth grade--town fast-pitch softball, a tradition in the village for years, was slowly walking off the field. For years afterward, my old town-team uniform--I played third base, B-team--hung downstairs in our basement. Somewhere along the line, my parents just chucked it.
The Oostburg Athletic Association, probably just two or three men, sponsored those teams. Nobody got paid. Out at the village park Oostburg teams would host ball games for most the summer-long: teams--plural. The A-team and the B-team. The A-team was men, some just about old enough to be B-team dads. The B-team was a junior varsity, the future of fast-pitch softball, although in this case I don't know that anyone played B-team town softball after we did. High school baseball, as well as plain-and-simple prosperity, wiped out summer, town-league fast-pitch softball.
It paid absolutely nothing and cost a lot of time, but it created stardom. The good hitters and fielders had as much star power as anyone in town. I'll never forget my dad's jealousy when some guy came up to me after a game and said when he saw me hit he was reminded of the way my dad used to. He was talking about my uncle, not my dad, who'd never played town softball. I never saw my uncle play, had no idea what position he held down; but I knew by collective unconscious that Uncle Allie used to park homeruns out beyond the far center-field bandstand.
Somewhere around the B-team sixth inning, the A-team would start loosening up. We'd still be playing just ten feet away, but for the fans in the stands, the big-time stuff had only just begun.
I was on the bench because we were up to bat. The A-team--the ones with newer uniforms--were right there in front of us when some guy--I don't remember who--wondered whether anybody else had heard this great story about the Korean woman who'd flashed her tits in front of Jay Schaap--"you know, the barber in Cedar Grove. He's got that little shop on Main Street."
I remember thinking that none of them considered they were talking about my Uncle Jay. But then, Uncle Jay didn't matter to them or to my own teammates, who couldn't help but hear. The story was what she flashed.
What was amazing to m, and I remember it yet, was that the guy was telling it right, all the stuff about the boy's hair falling on that bare breast, about Uncle Jay deciding not to use the whisk broom but to blow it off, about getting down there close enough to be sure a good whiff would leave that thing clean as a whistle.
The shape of the story was the same, nothing exaggerated, nothing lost in translation, nothing grown into it. It was boilerplate Uncle Jay. Guys laughed, boys giggled, and no one asked me if it was true. No one was thinking it was my Uncle Jay. The point was that something super cool had happened in Uncle Jay's barber shop. To shut up her bawling kid, a young mom hauled out her tits right there in front of the barber. Can you believe that?
The softball field rendition was the second telling of the story. Uncle Jay's own embellishments were still there, but something about it seemed different.
I didn't know the word then, but maybe the best way for me to describe the telling is that when I heard it on the softball field, it felt more prurient, more sexual, more of a guy-thing. If it hadn't been my uncle at the heart of it, I'd have loved hearing every second of the telling. I wouldn't have been embarrassed.
What changed was the audience--no longer just my dad and me in the shop, but this time a softball team in uniform, all male, two teams. We all heard it. Right there on the third base line the audience made the story feel like something else all together.
The discomfort I felt when Uncle Jay told it in the barber shop arose from hearing it in the presence of Dad. I guess I wasn't sure that he'd ever thought much about breasts. That he was laughing was as shocking as the story itself.
But I'd been around enough ball parks enough to know the A-team thought about breasts, and I knew the B-team did.
And they weren't breasts, they were tits.
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