It is a summer night and windy,the 2001 baseball season. Barry Bonds is mocking home run records with each swing, this time against the Florida Marlins. I am hurrying through the manicured promenade of Pacific Bell Park’s lower deck, just before the game starts. Actually I’m being chased, though don’t know it yet.

In the crowd ahead, my crazy cousin stumbles and blathers nonsense like “Hum Giants!” to Dippin’ Dots vendors. I have been shouldering through families and elderly alike, trying to catch up to him.

Then suddenly dark beer is running all through my hair, behind my ears, pooling in the hood of my sweatshirt.

A well-dressed, beastly eyed man is standing next to me. He holds a dripping plastic cup upside down. He throws his chest into mine. “My drink was full. You spilled it!” He points to his cashmere turtleneck, stained and damp. “Now I’ve spilled what’s left on you, boy.”

Before I can apologize—I’ve been known on occasion for bumping strides –my cousin appears with his friend, the immitigable Bo. They pin the man’s arms behind his back, hoisting him against the new stone of the wall.

People stop. A bird-faced woman, no taller than five feet and apparently angry-man’s wife, seems desirous to scream, but only her eyes are appalled.

My cousin is reaching for something in his pocket, something shiny.

Bo keeps hold and pulls the man’s turtleneck down to expose a quivering throat. My cousin draws the gleaming object to the man’s bared skin.

That afternoon, we had been drinking. I started with warm Bud Light, gulping it down on the car ride from the Santa Cruz Mountains. I had stuffed into the back of an old Jeep Cherokee along with a handful of my crazy cousin’s barbarous friends. By the time we passed through Millbrae, we had to force the driver, a sober and laid-back kid with a Nazarene beard, to pull over so we could urinate on some junipers.

Finally the stadium approached, a green and empty swath of upper deck. We were howling along to a chorus by the mechanically savvy rapper, Deltron: I’m caught in the grip of the city… madness…

We parked for free along the bay, near the piers behind the passholders’ lot. For the next two hours, I skulked around the car. A friend of my crazy cousin, a kid I called Tay-ron the Destroyer, produced a bottle of Jagermeister, and my memory began to waver.

I remember barking that only heathens could forget the name of retired Giants catcher Bob Brenly.

I remember sitting in the backseat, smoking a plastic-lipped cigar and arguing that former San Francisco outfielder and gang member Kevin Mitchell could punch me in the face anytime, as long as he made another barehanded catch.

Later, I told a passing fan in a teal Florida jacket that, pound for pound, a Marlin was far and away the stupidest fish in the sea.

And there’s a vague recollection of berating my cousin for not letting me run down to the bay so I could “cool off.”

But most of all I couldn’t stop talking about Barry Bonds, about his breakneck home run pace, about the magic in his bat that could smite mammals and reptiles alike.

Then I remember wanting, desperately, to take a nap.

A half hour before game time I woke up, my head slouched against the dashboard. The door opened and my cousin stared in.

“Dude,” he said.

“What?” My shoes and socks were soaked.

His friends crowded around, grinning like thieves.

“You don’t remember?” my cousin asked.

“Yes I do?”

They all seemed to speak at once. “You were jabbering on and on, about the cowardly manager of the Arizona Diamondbacks who’d dared to walk Bonds with the bases loaded, and all of a sudden you took off down the road, waving your arms at the people parking, yelling stuff like, ‘Steve Finley has devils for feet. Beware of right-center!’”

“But we’re playing the Marlins tonight,” I protested. “Not the DBacks.”

“You made no sense. You even threw your cigar nub at a little girl.

Yelled something about getting the out at second.”

“No!”

“Hit her right in the forehead. We barely had time to distract her
father, so you could escape.”

“I do love the double play,” I said, vaguely recalling a stumble at high
speed.

“We found you crouching in the bay water near the pier, carrying on about how Judas and Jeff Kent both love mustaches. It was all we could do to get you in the car, to calm down.”

Much of it came back. I wiggled my spongy toes. “It’s time to go inside,” I said. “The crowd will provide cover.”

Inside the stadium, as my crazy cousin and the immitigable Bo held angry-man, fans stopped to watch. I was watching, too. The man struggled, throwing elbows, and my cousin said, “Oooh, are you a good bitch or a bad bitch?” That’s when Bo pulled down the turtleneck, when my cousin reached into his pocket for the gleaming piece of metal.

We are not felons, of course (at least not on record). My cousin was holding a silver San Francisco Giants bottle opener, of quality steel and good weight, given to him by my mom, his aunt, at Christmas.

He slid the blunt rectangle up to angry-man’s throat, Bo keeping hold, and brushed the flat part across the pale skin. Then he slapped the opener against the man’s forehead and said, “Kiss the logo and you can go.”

The captive sighed in relief, and I did too. His wife, bird-woman, began to scream, a bit belatedly.

I felt the need to flee in my wet toes. But my cousin and Bo wouldn’t budge. From the floor, my cousin had picked up the beer cup—the one that had been dumped on me—and he offered it to the man’s trembling lips, saying, “No, it’s fine. There’s still some left. Please, drink it. It’ll just go to waste.”

I pulled Bo off the floundering captive, grabbed the sleeve of my cousin’s Giants jacket, and I yelled, “Bonds!” Nothing more needed to be said.

It was August 16th. Big Poppa already had 52 home runs. There wasn’t a person in that park who didn’t think Barry would hit one that night. But we were all wrong. He would hit two.

My cousin slapped the stunned angry man on the back, then said, “We should have a beer together later. I’ll let you sign my bottle opener.”

Suddenly we were running, tumbling, jarring our way through crowds of people, past the stairway entrance of the Lefty O’Doul gate, around the foul pole, to the cable car and its magnanimous bell, even down to the vacant space below the scoreboard, where Sega Dreamcasts,  if I remember correctly, had been set up for the lolling public.

Finally we doubled back. We had only one destination, of course: the right-field walkway, where we’d wait for Barry’s first at-bat.

The game started. We snuck into some empty seats in the first row, above the 309 sign in right field, our view opening upon the bowl of the grandstand.

I kept seeing angry-man everywhere: in rows of families, in the bleacher crowd, in the left-field bullpen—masquerading as the overweight pitcher Livan Hernandez. I imagined him coming for us with sweaterwearing police officers that shared his sense of outrage. It seemed only a matter of time.

Soon Barry Bonds was at the plate. I’ve looked up his stats for this night. The box score says he was hitting third in the order, that he homered in the fourth inning, then again in the eighth.

But I swear, that’s wrong. He must have gone yard in his first at-bat, on the first pitch. At least that’s how it felt; he tapped his toe, cocked his hands, pivoted on his back foot, and hit a line drive that was still rising as it passed over my head.

It took a few innings to realize that the immitigable Bo had disappeared. We didn’t dare search for him, on account of our own fears of separation, though the sober kid with the Nazarene beard made a gentle tour through the walkways of the park.

Later, Bo would tell multiple versions of his disappearance: how he’d stumbled upon angry-man and bird-woman in the Club Section and sat behind them for a few innings, breathing heavily, asking if they were finished with their nachos; how he’d procured a hand-stamp and left the park, tumbling south, checking for unlocked cars so he could snatch parking passes and loose change; even how he’d made it to the Giants clubhouse, where he found utility outfielder Armando Rios crying softly and asking, in a voice meant for children, why his home runs always seemed to be struck down into the gloves of the opposition.

But by the time Bo made it back to us, the game was almost over.

Bonds had just hit another round-tripper.

After the game, we filed out the same as always: through the adjoining Giants Dugout Store with its overpriced jackets and visors, over McCovey Cove on a crowded bridge, and back to the car, its black paint gleaming beneath a streetlight in the way the bay also gleamed, a dozen feet away. It could have been any other night. There have been countless, with my cousin and Bo, with the Nazarene and Tay-ron, all of us growing up on the rim of the Bay Area and teetering, every so often, up the peninsula and into the city.

I’ll tell you the truth. All I remember definitively from the game is Bonds’ second home run. The box score says that it was a three-run shot, giving the Giants the lead and the eventual win.

Here’s what I see: an anticipatory promenade, flashbulbs behind home plate, the view from right field that makes the pitcher appear to be throwing across his body, the bill of Barry’s helmet dipping as he swings, the ball shooting, hooking hard, right toward us, the stereo roars as we turn and watch his second blast of the night plummet to the oily water, disappearing for an instant, then bobbing up, as if the ball decided to remind us that everything had happened exactly this way.

Tim Denevi has recently published fiction online in Hobart, Pindeldyboz, and Denver Syntax. He is currently the 2005–2006 Abernethy Fellow at Manoa: A Pacific Journal. He lives in Honolulu with his wife, a geologist.