Free Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth Page B

she was a small child, and that I would never have seen again . And there are those eyes of reddish brown, eyes the color of the crust of honey cake, and still open, still loving me ! There was her ginger ale-and thirsty as I was, I could not have forced myself to drink it!
    So I ran all right, out of the hospital and up to the playground and right out 'to center field, the position I play for a softball team that wears silky blue-and-gold jackets with the name of the club scrawled in big white felt letters from one shoulder to the other: S E A B E E S, A.C. Thank God for the Seabees A.C.! Thank God for center field! Doctor, you can't imagine how truly glorious it is out there, so alone in all that space . . . Do you know baseball at all? Because center field is like some observation post, a kind of control tower, where you are able to see everything and everyone, to understand what's happening the instant it happens, not only by the sound of the struck bat, but by the spark of movement that goes through the infielders in the first second that the ball comes flying at them; and once it gets beyond them, It's mine, you call, it's mine, and then after it you go. For in center field, if you can get to it, it is yours. Oh, how unlike my home it is to be in center field, where no one will appropriate unto himself anything that I say is mine!
    Unfortunately, I was too anxious a hitter to make the high school team-I swung and missed at bad pitches so often during the tryouts for the freshman squad that eventually the ironical coach took me aside and said, Sonny, are you sure you don't wear glasses? and then sent me on my way. But did I have form! did I have style! And in my playground softball league, where the ball came in just a little slower and a little bigger, I am the star I dreamed I might become for the whole school. Of course, still in my ardent desire to excel I too frequently swing and miss, but when I connect, it goes great distances. Doctor, it flies over fences and is called a home run. Oh, and there is really nothing in life, nothing at all, that quite compares with that pleasure of rounding second base at a nice slow clip, because there's just no hurry any more, because that ball you've hit has just gone sailing out of sight . . . And I could field, too, and the farther I had to run, the better. I got it! I got it! I got it! and tear in toward second, to trap in the webbing of my glove-and barely an inch off the ground-a ball driven hard and low and right down the middle, a base hit, someone thought . . . Or back I go, “ I got it, I got it- back easily and gracefully toward that wire fence, moving practically in slow motion, and then that delicious Di Maggio sensation of grabbing it like something heaven-sent over one shoulder . . . Or running! turning! leaping! like little Al Gionfriddo-a baseball player. Doctor, who once did a very great thing . . . Or just standing nice and calm-nothing trembling, everything serene-standing there in the sunshine (as though in the middle of an empty field, or passing the time on the street corner), standing without a care in the world in the sunshine, like my king of kings, the Lord my God, The Duke Himself (Snider, Doctor, the name may come up again), standing there as loose and as easy, as happy as I will ever be, just waiting by myself under a high fly ball ( a towering fly ball , I hear Red Barber say, as he watches from behind his microphone-hit out toward Portnoy; Alex under it, under it ), just waiting there for the ball to fall into the glove I raise to it, and yup, there it is, plock , the third out of the inning ( and Alex gathers it in for out number three, and, folks, here's old C.D. for P. Lorillard and Company ), and then in one motion, while old Connie brings us a message from Old Golds, I start in toward the bench, holding the ball now with the five fingers of my bare left hand, and when I get to the infield-having come down hard with one foot on the bag at second