You Memorize The Way Your Hand Lets Go

Aesculus glabra: My father, a tall, fat-fingered guy with a stomach that fell over his belt buckle who used to hold my entire hand in his palm, rubbed his thumb against the smooth side of his index finger. He had been sitting in the beige recliner with his eyes glued to the television set. In the living room—a labyrinth he’d built with his own hands—a picture of the final moments of the 2016 World Series was enclosed by a multitude of signed baseballs and glowing amber lights. In the tenth inning of game seven, the Cleveland Indians sent Michael Martinez—Michael Martinez, the fucking bum position player who rode the bench all year—to the plate to be the last man standing between the game staying alive and the Chicago Cubs winning their first championship in over one hundred years.

The Cavaliers were winning when the final buzzer rang and my father cried into the night, still squeezing my hand—curling his fingers around my knuckle like it was the rough edge of our lucky buckeye.

He’d left our family’s “lucky buckeye” in the cabinet above the television set. I don’t remember much of the next few moments, but the sound of skin scraping against his curled fingers was louder than the ball popping off Martinez’s bat. It was a ground ball to third base on an 0-1 count—another heartbreak added to the scrapbook. Dad rose from his chair and picked up a wine bottle—Chief Wahoo adorning the front—and placed it on the top shelf of the television stand, just behind a row of signed baseballs from the eighties. He bought the bottle for him and Mom to drink after the Indians won the ninety-seven World Series. But they didn’t win then and they didn’t win now. They blew a game seven lead—twice. “There’s always next year,” a war cry submerged in a bottle of piss warm vinegar that was once a delectable red wine—one that flowed like a waterfall, or a perfect jump shot.

Wine And Gold, Forever: His fingers meandered through the top shelf, looking for the buckeye. The Cleveland Cavaliers were up by one point against the Golden State Warriors in game seven of the 2016 NBA Championship. When Dad couldn’t place the buckeye, he sat back down in his recliner and grabbed my hand—my entire fist could still fit in his palm. The screen flashed against our faces and we couldn’t look away. The city of Cleveland hadn’t won a professional sports championship since 1964—when my father was just a year old. LeBron James—a kid from Akron, the King, the proclaimed “greatest of all time,” our city’s savior—chased down a California body, maybe it was Andre Iguodala but I can’t remember, and blocked a shot that would’ve given Golden State the lead. Dad sank out of the chair and put one knee on the carpet. He gripped my fingers in the same way he held onto those of his mother just hours before the game started. On a ventilator at the hospital, the machines in her room made sounds that clanked and howled like a roaring crowd.
The Cavaliers were winning when the final buzzer rang and my father cried into the night, still squeezing my hand—curling his fingers around my knuckle like it was the rough edge of our lucky buckeye.

Metamorphosis: In the seventies, Dad wandered around in the summertime from morning to dark, but mostly lingered near the neighborhood boys and played basketball on the slab of blacktop by the Hoover house. He had skinny legs shaped like upside down champagne bottles and drank from them with grace when outrunning everyone else on the court. In an account of my father’s jump shot, the local word of mouth claimed it was the sweetest in all of Trumbull County. “Money,” he’d say to me thirty years later when he’d drain a jumper during a game of “h-o-r-s-e.” Dad would stand on the railroad tie by the garage and send one of his crisp shots through the net and hold his hand in the air like Larry Bird. He had a bitchin’ follow-through, man. He placed his beer bottle on the front porch seat and stood stoically with his belly protruding out of his shirt. It was something to be in awe of, especially the way he could still cross you over and hit a step-back jumper without blinking an eye. Dad had a name for his over-the-shoulder shot—the reverse layup. He’d run under the basketball hoop and toss it, without looking at the net, practically behind his back. When I asked him how he could do it without looking, he said “as you get older, you memorize the way your hand lets go.”

Cycle: Before my final third grade peewee baseball game, Dad stood by me in front of our living room mirror and drew black streaks under my eyes. Under the revolving ceiling fan, he reached his hand behind the stacks of baseballs and pulled out our lucky buckeye. “Rub it,” he said, “for good luck and a win.” Placing the sacred nut under the curls of my nimble fingers, I rubbed it until static heat encompassed both hands. He gracefully placed it above the television set. Dad was the first base coach on my team, the Southington Reds, and played catch with me until the stars presented themselves above the roof of our house, launching balls into a different dimension for me to run down.

With the Browns down at halftime, Dad pulled our lucky buckeye out of his coat pocket and had me rub it for good luck. We’d never used the buckeye on a Browns game, but Dad wanted my first time to be a winner.

When it was too dark to see him, I mapped my way towards his body by following the sounds of the ball hitting the inside of his mitt. In my first three at-bats of that final game, I managed to collect a single, double, and a triple. Just a home run away from a cycle, I stepped up to home plate with dirt streaks on my pants and sweat dripping off my forearms. In peewee, the only way to achieve a home run is to smack the ball to the fence and pray to the ghost of Rocky Colavito that you can round every base before it’s back in the coach’s glove on the pitcher’s mound. I had never hit a homer before. I was never fast enough, on account of Genu valgum—also known as knock knees. But in my final at-bat, I watched Dad stand like Daedalus at first base and give me the go-ahead to let it soar. The sun reflected off his black sunglasses and his skinny legs buckled in the sweltering warmth. I looked at him and he smiled. With the first pitch, I drove a fly ball all the way to the fence, rocketing over the heads of prepubescent twerps. The rattling of the rusted chain-link echoed through the infield and Dad’s yells cut through it. Under the hidden cosmos he sent me around first and before I knew it, I was being motioned to round third and head for home plate. As my cleats smacked the rubber plate, I heard the roar of the crowd behind me. After attempting to catch my breath near the dugout, I felt the arms of my father wrap around my waist. He held me up to the sky—his winded offering to the baseball gods—and guarded me close. An “I love you” hid behind his lips as he kissed the top of my head. When our team went on to lose the game, I looked at my dad with welled eyes. “There’s always next year,” he responded as we walked hand-in-hand to our car parked across the street in the crackling Ohio summer heatwave.

The Rust Belt’s Sour Bark: The last time the Browns were close to going to the Super Bowl, it was January 1988, and Dad was sitting on a beat-up sofa with some friends. The team was one yard away from getting a chance to go to the pearly gates, but Earnest Byner fumbled the ball at the goal line. In his lifetime—what has now become our lifetime together—the Browns have made the playoffs less than a handful of times and never even sniffed the “big game.” We’ve spent the past decade-and-a-half sitting on our crummy living room sofa, laughing at a team that somehow, miraculously, becomes more embarrassing as each week passes by. The first Cleveland Browns game I ever attended was a Christmas present from Dad in 2007. He bought me two tickets and a brand-new Brady Quinn jersey—Quinn was our prized “quarterback of the future” who only lasted two years in Cleveland. It was under twenty degrees outside and we packed about four extra layers under our jerseys. We claimed our temporary residence—two plastic orange seats at midfield—and it felt like the most serene view in the stadium. The sun cracked through the clouds in the first quarter and the “Dawg Pound” behind the east end zone heaved beer cans onto the field, barking GO BROWNS over and over. With the Browns down at halftime, Dad pulled our lucky buckeye out of his coat pocket and had me rub it for good luck. We’d never used the buckeye on a Browns game, but Dad wanted my first time to be a winner. I remember the winding moments of the game and the way he stood next to me—his hands flailing around and saliva coming out of his mouth with every word he spoke. With a ten-dollar drink in hand, he howled at every first down and cursed every time our running back, Jamal Lewis, was tackled in the backfield. The light fourth-quarter snow coated his beard and he gave me his gloves for warmth. When Kellen Winslow caught the game-winning touchdown, Dad picked me up and I ascended towards the sky in his hands. We enjoyed that game more than anything else because, for once, the two of us didn’t spend a Sunday miserable together. He clutched my hand as we walked out of the stadium but there were moments where he’d let me run ahead of him—yelling at his sluggish frame to move faster because it was so damn cold. In his blue pickup truck he handed our buckeye to me, letting my tiny hands keep it safe on our ride home. I cranked up the radio, he burped out a combination of beer and hot dogs, and we let Bruce Springsteen take us home along the Rust Belt of I-77. Whether he was young or old, even on a snowy Cleveland Sunday, the sun still shone down on him—my patron saint decked out in orange and brown.

The Lucky Buckeye: We shuffled into a bar near Mollenkopf Stadium—home of the Warren G. Harding Raiders—before a football game. I gulped down a few root beers and watched Dad knock back a handful of Miller Lites. The neon sign in the window was half burnt-out and spelled BENA VIST instead of BUENA VISTA. A purple fluorescent streak painted my face as I let the carbonation sizzle against my teeth. The Raiders were playing their rivals—the Howland Tigers—and Dad was intent on seeing Daniel “Boom” Herron “run them fucking bums over,” as he colorfully put it. We climbed to a pair of open seats and settled in under the cool, Friday sky. The bleachers were loud, rattling like a broken metallic machine under us. Dad and I spent that afternoon surrounded by loud, drunk parents yelling at the refs and cursing at other fans and fighting over stale nachos. Dad almost picked a fight with a Harding dad just to get a little plastic football for me. It was black with SUNRISE INN PIZZA written in gold on the side. The cheerleaders stormed the bleachers with a bag full of them and, of course, my beaming eyes couldn’t look away. When Dad put his fist about two inches from the face of a man—who dressed in camo and was probably packing some heat underneath his sherpa-lined jacket—I couldn’t move. I’d never seen my Dad take an interest in “winning” anything for me before. I’m not sure if it was the bucket of brews he packed away before the game that pushed him to throw his hand up in the air for the ball, or if it was just my rosy-red cheeks eager for a plastic toy I was surely going to lose within a few days of getting. What he did was his way of saying he loved me and I was on top of the world in that moment. I, a chubby second grader with a missing front tooth who liked to sing Tom Petty songs in the car, was on the receiving end of a gift that cost about five cents to make. I held onto the little football inside my coat pocket as we walked tall through the parking lot, stumbling over our laughter after Harding completely dismantled Howland. I let go when we came across a string of buckeye trees poking up through the dry soil just off the lot. Dad lifted me up by the waist and held me close to the sky while I picked a buckeye off the tree. This time it wasn’t him throwing his hand in the air, hoping for a miracle, but it was me. I soared towards the sky beyond the branches like Icarus, thinking my arms could almost touch the sun, but before I got too close he pulled me back down into his chest while I grasped the buckeye in my palm.

 

Matthew Mitchell is a creative writing major at Hiram College in Hiram, Ohio, and has spent all twenty of his glorious years living in the heart of the Midwest. His work will be featured in upcoming editions of The Oakland Arts Review and Clockhouse. He is a recipient of the Gillmer Kroehle Prize for Creative Nonfiction as well as the Barbara Thompson Award for Fiction.