Dear Linc,
Now that you are once again in a championship team, let us turn to the matter of your cray cray fanbase. Imagine that this mysterious entity posting on your official Facebook page as “Team Lincecum” — stylized as such either to echo your initials or to capitalize on your gothic good looks so trendy during these times of Twilight — convenes to review not only the content on your Facebook page but also the chatter on message boards and, of course, Tumblr.
The hypothetical members of Team Lincecum are not all blonde babes as one would judgmentally expect. In fact, a healthy balance of optimism and pragmatism suggests that they are a varied bunch. There are some guys, some girls, one blonde and several brunettes — although I’m mainly checking out the guys, like the one brunette dude who has short hair, silver eyeglasses, and likes to walk around with his dress shirt conservatively buttoned up all the way to his patently muscular neck. Even in conjecture I’m still very gay.
Each member of the team has a laptop and they convene around a conference room in some office at The Ballpark. Most if not all of them tend to rock back and forth in their swivel chairs as they chew their pens and restlessly consider the nonsense on their screens.
“Check this out,” says one, pointing to an item on your Facebook profile. “She’s using Tim’s last name.”
“That’s nothing new,” snickers another.
“But this one is pretentious. The nerve!”
It’s true. The person in question not only has taken your name for herself but also the first name of a famous (or infamous?) socialite. Her comments, punctuated with deranged punctuation, reveal her to be adolescent in both age and attitude. She is an internet troll. In fact, this person used to quarrel with Ally. It has been a long time since I’ve seen any postings from her and in fact Team Lincecum is pulling up old material, ancient history.
“How about something more current?” someone suggests.
Well, let’s move onto the obvious. But rather than review my Facebook or, God forbid, my blog, Team Lincecum has managed to sneak into my sexts. Did I say sexts? I meant texts.
After the party tonight, I caught up with my friend at the Hotel Utah. I watched some bands with him and nursed a beer. Honestly, Linc, there’s nothing better than a cold Guinness fresh from the tap. But I digress.
At my age, my ears could only take so much noise before I called it quits and left my friend behind to grab a bite to eat at the taqueria across the street. Synchronicity cast its spell when Spencer texted me as just as I was sitting down to my steak burrito and noting that a TV was turned to Comcast SportsNet. The highlights footage showed Panda tumbling over a railing. I stared at this slack-jawed for a few moments before I picked up my phone again.
“They’re skipping Timmy tomorrow, eh?” Spencer had typed.
I stared at the screen and thought, Huh?
The thought hadn’t occurred to me and to be honest with you I was too tired to really consider it further. I put the phone down and picked up my burrito. Idly, I chewed without much more thought until my eyes gazed upward at the TV again. The anchors were now talking about how you were scheduled to start tomorrow but that instead you were going to be given the day off to synchronize you for the NLDS.
“Wow,” I typed back to Spencer. The modifier is more dramatic than it sounds, as I was not really all that surprised at the change. It made sense. “You’re right.”
Then the thought came to me. I chuckled as I wrote: “Girl, if that boy were mine, he would not be resting tonight. We would be making use of that trapeze in my room.”
I laughed at my own joke and the price that I paid for it was getting a piece of steak meat trapped in my throat. My eyes watered sourly as I coughed it up and swallowed it back down again.
My phone buzzed. Spencer said: “Multiple orgasms are a lot of work.”
I tried to picture what it would be like to achieve orgasm whilst dangling from a trapeze. Would the laws of physics work against it? Was a biology a factor? Could a person come if all their blood was rushing to their head and echoing the incongruously joyous and displeasurable brain freeze of a Slurpee?
It took too much thinking. I chomped into the burrito.
My friend who was still at the Hotel Utah told me he was leaving soon. Then he sent his regrets about not being able to join me for a bite to eat. He had to catch a Golden Gate Transit bus back to his place up in Marin.
“When are you leaving?” I texted.
I looked up at the TV. Jon Miller was in the broadcast booth dancing.
“Right now,” the friend wrote. “I gotta take the bus headed to Sausalito.”
He actually lives somewhere further north, though he’s an A’s fan.
With tonight being such a unique night, what with Hobbit anniversaries and NL West titles and all, I couldn’t restrain myself.
“Oh good,” I typed. “Timmy lives there. If you see him, tell him about the trapeze in my room.”
The thing about talking dirty to an old friend is that there are different levels of old friendship. Some old friends like you for your writing or your shared taste in movies. This one was not Selma or Mary, Spencer or Ray — the ones most accustomed to my jocular innuendo.
A moment passed and then another. He’d dumped me. He had known me prior to my baseball fandom and I was now a whole new person, completely incomprehensible. One revelation of my lust in one moment was all it took to erase so many years.
“Never knew you were acrobatic,” he texted back.
That’s the spirit, I thought.
Joe
