BY WYL VILLACRES
“4-6”
Some facts about my father:
-My dad grew up reading poetry, writing down his favorites by hand in a small leather journal where he kept clippings from baseball stories and pressed flowers. His favorite was Baseball’s Sad Lexicon about a Giants fan watching the Cubs make a 6-4-3 double play.
-In 1985, my dad had his first child with my mother. By then, he was working for a shipping company. Soon, he’d be managing the place, soon he’d get a GED, then a college degree. But before that, a few days after my older sister was born, once my mom was out of the hospital, all of his coworkers bought tickets to see the Cubs and the Phillies to celebrate his new kid. They sat in the bleachers and drank before, during and after the game. His best friend Frankie drove home that night and crashed his car into the side of a building.
-My dad was born in Carolina, Puerto Rico in 1955. The same city that Roberto Clemente was born in, the same year that Clemente started playing for the Pirates.
-My grandmother was sterilized in the hospital by a Yankee doctor because of “over population” in Puerto Rico, so my dad was an only child. This was a common practice at the time.
-In 1972, the same year Clemente died in a plane crash, my dad hopped a flight to Chicago to work in his cousin’s restaurant. In the summers, he’d sign on to help clean Wrigley Field after day games. They’d give him a couple bucks and let him watch the game for free.
-My dad, when he’d fill up his leather journals with other people’s poems, would buy a new one and file the old one away, chronologically. When he died, we found them all still in order.
-My dad started writing his own poetry after he was diagnosed with liver cancer. The doctors said he’d get four to six more years. His first poem was called 4-6 and started with the line “To short, stop the advance.” On the page, you could see the erase marks that turned “Too” into “To.”
-My dad signed me up for baseball when I was six, and then every year after that until high school. I was usually placed out in center field, batting ninth. He put me in the park district instead of real Little League because in real Little League there were cuts. No matter how bad I was, though, my dad would come to the games, and when we would head home after, would say “It’s a beautiful game. You’re lucky just to play.”
-The day I was born, my dad wrote in his journal “Baby boy. Beautiful. Can’t wait to show him baseball, show him poetry, show him the world. So full of love.” I read it twice before I stopped reading his journals forever.
-My dad’s favorite poem was Baseball’s Sad Lexicon. The opening lines are “These are the saddest of possible words: ‘Tinker to Evers to Chance.’” But we both know they aren’t.
Wyl Villacres is a bartender from Chicago. He’s the author of Bottom of the Ninth (WhiskeyPaper) and the forthcoming Here is Where I Was Lost (Wyvern Press 2016). His stories have been published in McSweeney’s, Hobart Pulp, and One Throne Magazine, among others. He has also been featured in the Best of the Net 2014 anthology and was called notable in Best American Essays 2015. Find out more at wylvillacres.net or hit him up on Twitter: @Wyllinois.