Right Field

I tilted my head at the text message on my phone: I’m going to be in Irvine today if you want to talk. Sent by Linh, Saturday, November 6. He wanted to make up, yet it only had been a week since I—what’d I do again? Yeah, since I had a threesome with two other guys at his place in his bathroom and broke his towel rack. I thought we’d both move on, but seeing that he wanted to make up, I figured that I couldn’t at least leave his offer go ignored. I texted him back telling that I’d see him later at night, but first, I had to go to an audition workshops for PD, a team in Fullerton.

Originally, I had no intent to try out for PD. I was set on doing the February midyear auditions for the team I got extremely close to getting into back in October, and, assuming that I did make it in during the midyear auditions, and if I was on PD, I’d have to leave PD after only having been on it for three months. To me, there were some serious ethical issues with that.

However, at the workshops, a few friends, some who were on the team currently and some who were alumni from the team, knowing my situation, pushed me to try out anyway. My friends from UCI, Angela and Mimi (who was now at UCI for college), also needed a third group audition partner, so, I figured, fuck it. Tenth audition was a charm?



I could see myself playing baseball, maybe even for the junior varsity team when I got to high school. Ever since the first grade, when my dad bought a plastic hollow bat and ball toy set, we walked to the park together and I’d swing at the ball with so much force from my tiny Asian arms that I’d eventually dent the ball and bend the bat. Now, with our baseball unit coming up in my eighth grade P.E. class, I was excited to finally grasp a real metal bat and hit a real stitched baseball.

“Brian’s up at the bat—everyone move up!”

I glared at Seth as he inched closer from his position at first base. Well, screw you Seth. Just yesterday when my team played a different team, I hit the ball so hard and far that I managed to run all the way to second base. Prepare to get your ass shown up.

I struck out, our team’s third out.

I ran to my place in the outfield and felt a tap on my shoulder. “Take right field,” the team captain told me. Yeah, I was already heading there. I turned around only to see Seth running up to me. I took a deep breath and stuck out my chest, ready for another snide comment from Seth.

“Just stick to DDR, Brian.”

Screw you Seth.



I woke up and found myself grasping nothing but a lonely lifeless pillow in my arms. Fuck that shit. I rolled over and found Linh sound asleep on his side, facing away from me. I smiled. I snuggled closer and slid my arm underneath him even though I knew it would wake him up. It did. He turned around and smiled back.

“Y’know,” I said, “I’ve missed you all this week and last week too.” We kissed.

“Liar.” We kissed again.

“What? I am not a liar.”

It had been a long week. The group performance that Angela, Mimi, and I had been working on for PD auditions was probably the most amount of effort that I had ever put into a group audition. We spent entire evenings at the gym, going from 4 PM all the way to 1 AM with nothing more than some packed PB&J’s to keep me going. By the time I got home, Linh would already be getting ready for bed. Even though we didn’t get to webcam or talk that long, it was those brief two-minute gnight conversations that had me looking forward to the end of the day.

I had to cut short my stay at Linh’s place, unfortunately, because I had to get back to UCI and practice at 1. I got to see him later at night again though during my group’s dinner break when I drove half an hour up to his team’s studio to drop off a PB&J with sliced bananas for him, bananas because I knew he liked them in his cereal, so I figured they’d work in a sandwich.

I kept on thinking back to the Saturday night that we made up—or rather, made out. For the first time. It was as though we continued where we last left off. I didn’t understand how it happened. Linh didn’t want to talk about the threesome, or the towel rack, or why he changed his mind. He only asked to hold me, and so I let him. Everything that happened since then, I forced myself not to question, realizing how happier it made me to not live my day to day life scrutinizing and not believing.



I’m losing a love. I thought French was totally for me, but I guess it was really never meant to be. I read over my blog entry and thought about a title. Something Frenchy. “Mais le Sort a Voulu”—as fate would have it—sounded pretty good. Trung and I had an AIM discussion about the entry, but it quickly went to shit.

Trung:
You can substitute "French" in your entry for anything. Dance shall come in four years. The entry will be like, "I packed the last of my Kallusive shirts into a box. The still glittering Gingerbread Man no longer looked angry at what it was smashing, but it was instead angry at me. Returning his sneer with one of my own, I closed up the box, sent it to the nearest Goodwill, and bought a new dress shirt and tie with the money. Goodbye college. It's time to grow up." Hee. THAT'S A GOOD ENTRY. Save that.

bbq dinner:
well i could reuse it in like two days [our would've-been two-year anniversary mark] and replace "french" with "trung".

Trung:
you could...that was pretty bitchy of you to say.

bbq dinner:
i know.

Trung:
(4:05:32 AM) do you feel better now?
(4:07:05 AM) i really didnt appreciate that
(4:12:47 AM) fine. don't answer. whatever.




I found a text message from Linh sitting in my inbox. Good luck with auditions. You can do it. Sent Sunday, November 14th.

I replied to it, Thanks. I won’t really need it though because I’m just doing the audition for fun.

I was going to ask to not be considered. I had it decided since I woke up the day of auditions. I didn’t want to tell Angela or Mimi because I didn’t want them to convince me out of it. I had the application in my hand, and I was ready to write it down, “Auditioning for fun only,” but then I stopped myself.

I thought, maybe I should tell the director about my plans to try out for another team in February. I still wanted to make it onto PD because I knew it’d provide me with training that I would otherwise not be able to afford, but I knew telling the director my plans would send my application straight into the shredder. No team would take someone they knew would be leaving (or planning to) in three months.

Well, either way, I wouldn’t be getting into PD, so I figured I might as well talk to the director. He told me to write down “planning to try out for another team in February” on my application and that he and the other board members would take it into consideration when discussing my audition. He didn’t sound at all pleased.

Looked like I shot myself in the foot. Shit.

After turning in my application, I checked my phone for Linh’s response to my last text message. Oh. I see. So I couldn’t talk to you because you weren’t being serious about something? Messed up. Lol...

I ignored him for the entire following week.



“I don’t know what Ranier’s going to do while you and I are at Super Saturday.” I took my eyes off the road for a second to check out my backseat. “I guess he’ll just be chilling in my car cleaning stuff and walking around the neighborhood. Remind to hide his Valentine’s Day present.”

“Sounds good. Speaking of Super Saturday and Breakthrough, you know what Priscilla told me a few months ago? She was surprised that you came back to teach at Breakthrough for a second summer.”

I slid both my hands from the bottom of the steering wheel to the top. 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock positions. The sound of Priscilla’s name always made me sweat. “What? Why?”

“Because during your guys’ first summer, she got the impression that you weren’t really serious about teaching. You didn’t seem mature enough for the job, and she didn’t believe you whenever you talked about wanting to teach French in high school as a career. She thought you were one of the least likely of the teachers to return. I understood her points. Sometimes Brian, I really do question the things you do, why you do them, and if you can actually be serious about them. Look at what happened to French, for example.”

I tightened my grip on the steering wheel and narrowed my eyebrows, forcing myself to concentrate on the road. Fuck you Priscilla.



One week passed since the audition before I was ready to talk to Linh (online) about what made me mad to the point of ignoring him for an entire week: him thinking that I wasn’t serious about an audition that I was doing “for fun.” The talk eventually boiled down to a sloppy argument over semantics, about what I meant by “for fun” and what he meant by “not serious.”

Linh:
When you use ["for fun"] for an audition, it means you don't care.

My response to him, I could imagine myself shouting and throwing a fist at the wall for every syllable as I pounded each letter of each word on my keyboard.

bbq dinner:
I don't know who “you” is supposed to be, but I always care. It seems like I'm getting pissed off over something trivial, but it really means a lot. All throughout my life, whenever I tried to do something I really cared about, people would look at me and think of me as a joke.

Linh said he understood why I got mad, and we agreed to call the whole “for fun” / “not serious” thing a misunderstanding. I was happy that he at least understood where I was coming from on wanting to be taken seriously. After all that was settled, I finally told him the good news: In case you haven’t noticed all the congratulatory posts on my Facebook wall, I made it into PD.

The celebration was cut short. Surprisingly, he didn’t notice, and that was because there was something frequently on my wall that made him too uneasy to ever click on my page: He brought up Trung.