Excerpt
756*
by Nick Thran
for Barry Bonds
We had to fill him up with the feats of mythical giants—Zeus and Goliath,
Hammerin’Hank and The Babe.We had to fill him up with the where-
were-you-whens? The fictitious baseball works by masters like Roth
or DeLillo.We had to fill up his trophy case, his endorsement deals.
Had to fill up the Jumbotron with his image, the ballpark with our bodies,
the newspaper columns with box-scores, OPSs and Slugging Percentages,
fill them with the details of his daily performance considered by rights
to be in the public domain.We had to fill him with the awkward silences
over dinners with our girlfriends’ fathers, our granddads, our clients—
inhuman feats to bring up as we ironed out our own all-too-human details.
We had to fill him up with fake wars, fake breasts, fake reports. Fill him up
with the false sense of affirmation that men of a certain stature existed
well beyond the pale.We had to fill him up with our own hard luck,
our nine-to-five jobs, our paltry salaries.Then we had to fill up his bank
account as we paid for the soaring prices of tickets, jerseys and hotdogs,
lining his pockets by filling the stands for each and every game.We had
to fill him up with scientific advances, bad advice, tough choices, and then
we had to fill him up with what we would have done, the decisions our senses
of decency, of respect for the game’s history, would have compelled us
to make.When he didn’t return the wild rounds of applause, we had to
fill him up with our loathing. We had to fill him up with test results
and government sanctioned inquiries, just to make sure we were able
to set the record straight. And after we filled him up almost to bursting
we finally had to let him go, as a child, indifferent, lets go of a balloon
in a parking lot, and watches the asterisk
beside his own name floating away.
