Play Ball
By Joanna Lioce
I thought Jake was dead. He’d owed me $40 since the pandemic, and I was worried he’d stayed away from North Beach because he couldn’t afford to pay me back. Jake was 78 years old, and it was $40, so who gave a fuck, right? I’d worried about him in the only way you can; a regular at the bar turned friend with no family, no cellphone, a pretty hefty dose of PTSD from the Vietnam war, and a roommate he called “portly and rude,” always pointing out that although they didn’t get along, Jake “respected him.”
Jake had worked in the tenderloin as a 6 am bartender for years until he got fucked by a local rag writer. One morning, a local DJ and activist who identified as “a non-conforming gay man who dressed as a woman” was in the bar distributing cocaine to another customer. When Jake saw this, he began to yell at him, and someone decided to record the audio on their cellphone. Unfortunately, Jake didn’t choose his words wisely, saying something to the effect of “People like you can’t be in here.”
Now I know that he meant “people selling drugs,” but the journalist ran with it. He posted the story on his blog with the headline “Queers Unwelcome at (said Tenderloin bar).” This instantly grabbed a ton of attention, the way social media posts about controversial subject matter often do. After seeing the time of day the incident occurred, I immediately knew it was Jake and that there had to be some misunderstanding. I was particularly offended because I knew this journalist didn’t speak to anyone who was actually there (including Jake and the DJ) and was simply the recipient of someone else’s recording. His “article” was essentially an edited audio clip, roughly 4 seconds long, that read as an attempt to amplify his social media presence. I also felt it inappropriate that a straight man so brazenly used the word “Queers.”
There was a lot of talk. People were angry, and the DJ quickly obtained a level of celebrity he’d only teetered on before. Jake was immediately let go. We were all livid. He was an old man with few prospects, and his only support came from the VA, which he always seemed to avoid for reasons he didn’t share. His boss at the bar gave him some really nice baseball tickets as a kind of consolation prize and told him that if he attended a “Sensitivity Training” course of their choosing, they would consider his employment again in the future. Jake took the tickets and said, “Fuck a sensitivity course.”
He came into the bar the following week, and we talked about the article, what had happened, and his plan. He said, “I really didn’t mean it like that, Jo. You know me, I don’t give a fuck about that shit.” And it was true. I did know. Although a pretty gruff guy, Jake truly loved people. That was always obvious to me.
His only plan was to take me to the baseball game. I was worried about his future, but I was honored. With that, I gave him a frozen shot of Rumple Minze. Roughly one week later, I met him by the Willie Mayes statue at our settled time, and we were off to our first Giants game together.
As we walked down towards home plate, I was shocked not only by how impressive our seats were, but by the surrounding crowd. As someone who frequents the bleachers or upper deck, I’d never sat with people who looked so sophisticated. Old men wore suits and ties with embroidered Giants insignia, while their wives donned sweater sets and sun hats, with large glasses that covered half their faces. Young parents had their babies in what looked like car seats in the direct sun, the men in polo shirts and the women in sundresses the color of unhealthy salmon. I was used to people in clothes that, quite frankly, were appropriate for a sunny day at a baseball game, and I wondered how the upper echelon of the Bay Area didn’t know that babies need shade.
When we sat down, several people glanced at us, seemingly sizing us up to see whether we were father and daughter, a couple, or in the wrong seats. The woman sitting closest to me even asked us how we got our tickets, as she was used to seeing the couple that normally sat next to her.
“We won them,” I said quickly, hoping Jake wouldn’t hear.
Jake leaned across me and yelled, “I got fucked at work, so my boss gave me some baseball tickets.”
Since the tickets were on Jake (we were referring to them as his sensitivity training), the beers were on me. Once we settled in, I got up to get a round. As I said, I’d never been in such fancy seats before, so I had no idea where I was going. I walked down a long cement hallway, found the bar, and grabbed two hot dogs and two huge beers. When I tried to return to my seat, I looked around the crowded stadium, hands completely full, and realized I was lost. Then, I heard a gravely old voice scream, “Hey, lady,” and there was Jake, two middle fingers in the air, both clearly directed at me.
We didn’t talk much during the game. Jake definitely cursed more than I was comfortable with, considering the number of sunburned children surrounding us, but who was I to say anything? Later, my friend and another regular Baseball Jimmy came by. He’d worked at the ballpark his whole life. His dad sold merchandise, and his mom sold lemonade. Jimmy sold hot dogs and beer, carrying them through the seats. I’d never seen him actually working at a game because I’d never been in the fancy section, but I always knew Jimmy as “Baseball Jimmy.” We all did. He threw us two hot dogs and two cans of Coors Light and insisted that we not pay. He even refused our tip. Jake and I joked that he made us look good, and it was true. After Jimmy came by, everyone looked at us with a different sort of curiosity.
Joey Kerlin, All That Is Utterable But Meaningless, 2024, multimedia collage, 6" x 4".
The Giants won, and we made our way outside, deciding to go for a final drink at Water Bar. We ordered martinis (Jake gave me shit for ordering vodka, saying, “That’s not a real martini”) and a dozen oysters, half from New England and half from the northern California coast, just like us. He gave me a hard time for putting one of my oysters onto a piece of sourdough bread, saying, “That's like wrapping caviar in a goddamn donut.”
We had one of those great conversations where martinis go down like water, and it feels irresponsible not to order another. Jake told me about his upbringing, about being in the war, about the woman he loved who never loved him back. He told me that he’d started bartending because he couldn’t sit still, and he loved being around people. That he couldn’t sit at a desk. He could never work in a restaurant because there was nothing he hated more than food being wasted. He couldn’t work in a bar that was too dirty because it made him feel like he was going insane, and he always felt like he’d need to be there constantly to keep it up for everyone else. But he loved to bartend where he fit. He said it made him feel important every day.
“You know, you get it.” He said. “You have people who rely on you. They come to you with problems they can’t bring to their wife, their kids, or their friends. They come in when great things happen, too. They wanna tell you. They depend on you to be there, and it's not about the drinking. The drinking obviously helps, but that's just surface. That’s why I don’t know what the fuck I’m gonna do if I don’t get my job back. People look at me, and they see an old guy, but I’m still strong. I still lift weights every day. I don’t care about the money. I never had any money, but the job and the people mean a lot to me. They give me a reason to wake up because I know I’ve got people to see. I joined the army because I didn’t know anything, but I knew I wanted to help people. The army only taught me how to take a shit on some people in order to lift other people up. I didn’t like that, and I still certainly fucking don’t. But you put two people at a bar? Two people across a bar from each other? That’s safe. That's where you can reach people. Even if they just need to sit there, you’re there for them. That's why I’ve gotta get back to work, I can’t sit around all day. I’ve gotta keep moving. That's why I fucking love it, baby. And that's why I love you, because you fuckin get it. I’ve always known that you fuckin get it.”
I felt lucky because I absolutely identified with Jake, but often felt too young for that to hold its appropriate weight.
We finished our drinks and decided we should head home. I hailed a cab for Jake and gave his driver the fare. He asked me if I had any extra cash on me because it was unclear if he’d be going back to his job at the bar, and was concerned about food for the following week. He looked humiliated to ask. I gave him $40, which was all the cash I had on me, and told him I didn’t want it back. If I ever needed some money, he’d be the first person I’d ask. He told me to fuck off and that he’d bring it to North Beach in the next few weeks. I waved goodbye as he got into his taxi and I walked home.
Several months later, the city was shut down, and everyone was stuck in their respective homes for what felt like an entire year. I started wondering about Jake and whether he was getting along with his rude roommate. If he'd been able to get the unemployment we all received, or if he’d been kicked off after collecting post-incident unemployment nearly a year earlier. If he had enough food.
I’d asked some of his friends in North Beach if they knew how he was doing, but no one had seen him. I called his old bar and learned he never got his job back. Then I ran into Jake a few months later. He was sitting at a table at Cafe Trieste, next to a woman who was concentrating on her cellphone. I quickly walked over to his table and put my hand on his arm. “Jake,” I yelled, much to the surrounding tables' dismay, as they were reading quietly. He looked up at me and said, “Hi.” He looked right at me and smiled in the way you would a stranger, and I immediately knew he didn’t recognize me.
“Jake, it's Jo. How are you?” He looked over to the woman at his table, and she looked up at me with sympathetic eyes. I put my hand on his shoulder, said, “It's really great to see you. You look well,” then turned and walked toward the door. He didn’t say anything. I didn’t turn around.
My friend Ralph later told me that he’d heard Jake had eventually taken his old boss seriously and attended the sensitivity training, but was in an incident on his way home one day. He was defending an older lady on the 30 Stockton who was being screamed at by a homeless man. He was shoved from a step and hit his head on one of the bus’s handrails, partially cracking his skull and bruising his brain. “He had the scar to prove it, he told me himself,” Ralph said. But I wouldn’t need to see it. I wished I hadn’t seen him at all and that he just sort of disappeared like so many regulars who attach themselves and become my weird family of uncles, brothers, and sons, who then go off to die like old cats, sparing us both the pain and relentlessly cruel and messy indignities of a long life. I knew it was selfish, but I wished he’d have stayed away from North Beach. We could have just said goodbye at the taxi, never knowing what would happen after that day.
I searched the local media for information about the bus incident, but I couldn’t find anything. However, in my search of Jake’s name, I did read a follow-up article that the DJ from the bar was shot and killed in front of a strip club in the Tenderloin during a drug deal gone wrong a few weeks prior. A few months after that, Baseball Jimmy’s dad came into the bar and told me he died that Christmas Eve of a fentanyl overdose. They didn’t put the word out much, given the circumstances, and didn’t feel comfortable holding a memorial during the pandemic. I also read that the blog journalist had gotten married. Apparently, he really went big. Dancing at the Fairmount Hotel, drinks at Top of the Mark, photo shoots on flower-laden cable cars in fancy purple outfits. San Francisco monuments were used as props, the city his backdrop to highlight his newfound bliss.
Joanna Lioce is a writer and bartender currently living in San Francisco.
Joey Kerlin has been actively making and exhibiting work in the Denver Metro area since the early 2000’s in media ranging from functional ceramics to printmaking. His contemporary work is a synthesis of multiple media and techniques. He has been working as an art educator in both the private and public sector since 2010 and currently teaches at Aurora Central High School in the Charles Burrell Arts pathway.