Dispatch #15: A Stonecutter's Chorus (part 1)
A down on his luck minor league pitcher on the hunt for his big break in this three-part short story
Howdy from Dork Mansion—
Every year I make a vow to watch more baseball. I don’t have a team, I don’t even live in a baseball town. But I love baseball. I love how slow it is. It’s got the same tension and release as soccer, which I also love. This is the top reason I understand many people hate baseball, but there you have it. I love the sounds of the game. I love how people love it so intensely. (To be fair, I love this about all sports— people loving things intensely is something I love.)
This year I barely watched any baseball, except for a delightful World Series, but I did finish this story. It was published in a magazine that is now-defunct, so I’m psyched to bring it back to the world here.
I’ve also been obsessed with sculptors since watching this short documentary 20ish years ago. “The Stone Carvers” is, among many other things, an amazing time capsule of the artisans that built the National Cathedral in D.C. The way these guys talk about their work changed something in me. I wrote a song about it. I just love the idea Vincent Polumbo, one of the subjects in the documentary, talks about around 5.24— the difference between the sculptor and the carver. Sculpting is additive— they build onto the piece. Carving is subtractive. They start with a rough rock and they need to get the piece out of it. I love that. I’m still waiting for whatever I’m meant to be to come out.
So— even if you don’t love baseball, or carving, I hope you’ll find some space in your heart for Pete LeBlanc.
XO,
CD
A STONECUTTER’S CHORUS
By the time the bus pulls up it’s a hundred degrees in the parking lot, and I’ve sweat through my hat and shirt, but I refuse to do anything but stand there cool as a fucking cucumber in my Top Gun shades and jeans just to show those assholes in the office that even after all this pounding they couldn’t get me to crack.
I stomp my way down the aisle and find a seat in a middle row and slam my bag under my feet like a bratty child. I know the only eyes I’m getting are from the other guys who are also being sent back to the Minor Leagues and the brass doesn’t give a shit, but I can’t resist a goddam tantrum sometimes. Imagine you spent months or years kissing both ass cheeks of every manager and pitching coach and goddam bathroom attendant, working harder than every guy in spitting distance so you can pitch like the Hammer of Thor, hoping you get called up to the Majors only to get called into some pencil neck’s office at the end of Spring Training where they tell you We’re keeping you at Triple A, Pete. So you spit on the floor and they tell you, hey, it could be worse, you could’ve been demoted to a lower league, so you spit again and they tell you to watch it, and then you flip a table on the way out and they yell and holler and tell you to be grateful you still have a spot somewhere, that they could’ve just cut your ass and you’d never get to play ball for a living ever again.
Well, I tell you if you were me, you’d flip a table or two, every time. And you’d probably act like a brat on the bus. Tell me I’m wrong.
It’s all desert between Arizona and the Texas Panhandle, just rocks and scrubby trees, and after a couple hours it’s too dark to see anything. I click on the overhead light and pull a ratty paperback from my bag and stare out the window through my reflection. I’m not a big reading guy, but these days I’ll take anything to get the Baseball Gods back on my side. I flip to a dog-eared page and immediately fall asleep. I jerk awake as the bus brakes, and I squint into the early morning sun. I wipe the drool from my mouth and look at the book in my lap, the line with a thick black box around it.
You’re the sculptor, I’m the stone.
////////////////////////////////////
We stop for gas at a truck stop with a Snax Max convenience store. The sun casts a crystal glare on the long, straight interstate.
“Where the hell are we?” I ask the younger guy I recgonize from training in the seat ahead of me.
“New Mexico still,” he says. “Another few hours.”
“Fuck.”
I tuck the book back in my bag and fish out a ratty twenty dollar bill, the last cash money I’d seen in a while. In the Minors, if you’re not playing, you’re not making any money, and even when you do make any money it’s usually not enough to do anything with. Most guys get a job to pay the bills in the off-season to help stop themselves from digging into more debt. I’ve mopped floors, driven a forklift, sold, at various points, cars, shoes, acid, coke, and weed, and I’ve bagged groceries. I’m usually just about breaking even, so getting to March twenty bucks in the black is a damn win.
I take my twenty and get off the bus to look for breakfast. I walk the aisles of the Snax Max and grab a couple protein bars, some hot Cheetos, and a big ass bag of Skittles when I see this little kid stuffing a pack of Now and Laters down his pants, which are already bulging with loot. He sees me and his eyes bulge thinking he’s a goner, but I just put my finger to my lips and look behind me to the register. There’s one cashier behind a thick plexiglass window playing on her phone.
I look back over to the kid. He grabs another pack and bolts past me down the aisle towards the register. This little fucker has his pockets filled like a damn chipmunk stashing nuts in his mouth, knocking into shit left and right. The cashier looks up to see what the commotion is about and I yell, “Hey!”
The kid whips around and freezes. We lock eyes and I give him a little wink.
“Excuse me, ma’am, looks like yall are out of sunflower seeds,” I say, loud enough for her to hear me across the store.
“Huh?” she says, looking up from her phone. “Hold on, lemme check.”
As she’s coming around, I crouch down behind the rack and hand the kid my Skittles.
“Now you stand up straight and walk outta here nice and slow,” I whisper. “And don’t eat that shit all at once.”
“Sorry, sir, what were you looking for?” the cashier says.
The kid backs up and walks out just like I told him to and the cashier doesn’t notice a thing. I grab a bag of seeds from the rack and say, “Never mind, found ‘em.”
Back on the bus I stash my feast in the backpack and crane my neck out the windows to try and see where that kid went. Maybe there’s some broke down minivan somewhere with a family and a bunch of brothers and sisters sharing their first meal of the day, I don’t know. But the kid’s nowhere to be found. The parking lot’s empty. I get my book out and wait for the bus to rumble on.
////////////////////////////////////
I never wanted to do anything but play ball. And sometimes it’s more of an obsession than anything else, like a compulsion. It’s not fun, it’s not a game. I keep at it because I have to and because of that I end up turning my back on everything else. That’s the only way. Weddings, funerals, holidays. I haven’t seen my folks in years. They used to come to games in high school, but this job pays less than minimum wage, and it’s hard to get around to places if I’m not on the damn club bus. My brother has like three kids I’ve never met. Maybe it’s two. We used to be close, then I missed his wedding for a summer series in Roanoke and we haven’t really talked since. Took me a while to realize how much I needed a family until I was too far away for it to matter.
I went from being Big High School Baseball Star to sucking at rookie ball and having no friends in a matter of months, and that really bent me out of shape. Couldn’t throw for shit, couldn’t hit for shit. Everyone else threw too fast, and I threw too slow. My head was all over the place and nowhere good. So I clamped down. I didn’t talk to anybody, I barely ate. All I did was sleep, lift, and pitch.
No surprise, that routine didn’t last. After a couple years I found myself staring at the water-stained ceiling of the dorm in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where we were supposed to play an early season series against the IronPigs. A freak blizzard hit the Lehigh Valley and snowed us in for a week. We couldn’t leave, so we just hung out in the junior college dorms watching TV and shivering. On about day three, I just lost it. I lost it and I just kept losing it, wasn’t right for weeks, just sobbing and snotting all over, running to the bathroom to weep a couple times a day at least. Guys thought I was puking, which I let them believe because it felt less shameful that crying like a goddam baby, but there you go. Couldn’t explain it to you. I broke all the damn way down. Barely got out of bed some days. I just kept imagining my parents dying while I froze to death in Pennsyltucky wondering what in the hell I was doing with my life.
The snow had just started to melt when I called my brother for the first time in years. I figured if he picked up at all maybe he could help me get my shit back together. He sounded like nothing really happened, like we had just hung out last weekend.
“What’s up, Pete, how’s it going?”
“Oh, you know,” I said. “Hanging out. Usual.”
“Cool, cool,” he said. The line was quiet for minute.
“Hey, listen, I’m sorry about the wedding and shit.”
“Dude that was 5 years ago, I get it,” he said. “You know you’re an uncle now? Gotta meet your nieces and nephew someday, man.”
“Yeah, totally, cool,” I said. I just stared at the wall, clenching my jaw, trying not to lose it.
“So,” he said. “What’s up? What can I do for you?”
“I’m having a hard time,” was all I could squeeze out.
“Ah, gotcha,” he said and chuckled a little. “You’re not interested in catching up, you just need something. What is it? Money? Bail?”
I closed my eyes. Usually at this point I’d chuck the phone across the room and punch a wall, but I was too tired for that.
“I’m serious,” I said. “I need some help.”
I unloaded on him. I wept and he listened. Afterwards he said his professional opinion was that I was “depressed as shit.” We talked for another hour and when we were done, he told me to call again, it was good to hear from me. He said he wanted to stay close, he wanted his kids to know me. He told me mom and dad wanted to catch up, too, and he said he’d tell them I called. I said I’d try.
When the team finally left Allentown and checked into the next place, the desk clerk said I had a package. It was from my brother; he must’ve called the club or something to see where we’d be. It was a book called Prayers of Relinquishment, real Jesus-take-the-wheel type shit. Let-go-and-let-God-type shit. Bunch of garbage mostly, but one part of it stuck with me. The Stonecutter Prayer, they called it a “Stonecutter’s Chorus” in the old days when they sang everything. They say that when they were building the cathedrals and churches in France or Europe or whatever that the guys making the statues, the gargoyles and angels and shit, said the prayer before picking up the hammer and chisel every day:
“Lord, I am an uncut stone.
With a steady hand you carve me how you want.
Lord, though I hold the tools,
You are the sculptor, and I am the stone.
Carve me how you want.”
I think about the Stonecutter Prayer all the time. Those guys looked at a huge hunk of rock and didn’t see anything except the perfect statue trapped inside, the statue it was their job to get out. At my weak moments, like sitting on a bus going back to a shitty team after being denied access once again to my rightful place on a Big League roster, I wonder what the hell whatever sculptor in the sky has in mind for me.
Believe me or don’t, the Stonecutter Prayer saved me. For a while anyway. After a spring in the gutter, I had a long break in July, and I said the Stonecutter Prayer every day. Less a prayer than what I figured was a hex to get my mojo going again. Sure enough by September I was back on an even keel. I struck out eleven of my next thirteen batters, and for a while I thought I was back in business. But the end of the season came and I didn’t get called up, just traded me somewhere else. I still carry around that damn book wherever I go. I don’t read it, just kind of hold onto it like a lucky charm that’s out of juice.
Part 2 available on 11/18.
I liked this. Looking forward to chapter 2!