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Never Again: A Reading List About School Shooting Survivors

Students hold their hands in the air as they are evacuated by police from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., on Feb. 14, 2018, after a shooter opened fire on the campus. (Mike Stocker/South Florida Sun-Sentinel via AP)

I don’t remember anything of the day leading up to the moment when, in Spanish class, the schoolwide PA system crackled to life. There was a brief moment of static. Then, an administrator — maybe our vice principal — said something like lockdown, lockdown, this is a lockdown, this is not a drill. There was a terse quality to his voice. My teacher turned out the lights, crawled toward the windows I suddenly realized spanned from floor to ceiling, and closed the blinds. I, along with the rest of my classmates, crouched in the corner of the room. We kept close to one another, closer than we ever would be again, the rise and fall of our shallow breaths like a subdued chorus of fear.

The PA system remained silent. We looked at one another with eyes wide open, ears pinned back. My phone off and in my backpack, I sent mental messages to my parents and brother: I love you. I hope you can hear me somehow. Just days before, on the news, an expert on how to protect yourself during a school shooting had said that throwing textbooks or scissors at a shooter when they first stormed the classroom might help disrupt their shooting patterns. I whispered the idea within the huddle, and our teacher crawled to retrieve a box of Fiskar scissors, ones that were “safe” enough to be approved for classroom use, meaning the blades were dull, the plastic light. We pulled textbooks from the baskets beneath desks and held them. My palms sweated.

I do not know how much time passed. I do not remember if I heard the shot or if I only heard about the sound in the hallway in the days that followed. I do not remember if I cried. The thuck-thuck-thuck sound of a helicopter broke the silence, and we peeked through the blinds to watch it land somewhere near the school. My classmates texted messages to their families. We whispered about what might be happening, whether we were safe. No sound emerged from the PA to relieve us. Instead, as time passed, we watched as cop cars and news vans arrived. Parents texted classmates to say we were on CNN. From messages, we learned that someone had been shot on school property. In my mind, I sent another slew of silent messages to my family: I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive.

Long after the whir of the helicopter receded, someone, over the PA, told us we would have an early release from school. They didn’t say anything about what had happened, only that we were now safe. I retrieved my phone, called my mom, and wept when I heard her voice on the other side of the line.

The next day at school was supposed to be the statewide standardized test. I thought the administration might find a way to cancel the test, or even school. But they didn’t. Instead, in the halls before the first bell rang, rumors swirled: the student with the gun had ammunition in his backpack; there had been a chase; he had committed suicide because a girl he liked turned him down. I stress that these are only rumors — they have always remained rumors to me, because no administrator ever spoke openly about what happened. Even now, when I look at newspaper clippings of the event, nothing much is said other than that a student shot himself on campus and later died after being Life Flighted to a hospital. I can imagine that part of the reason why information was suppressed was because I went to a school that was only two years old in an affluent part of town.

That morning, instead of handling the subject with sensitivity, instead of reassuring the student population of our safety, instead of pausing standardized testing to talk about gun control, instead of taking time to mourn a member of our school, the administration sent us to our alphabetized classrooms, where a package of off-brand goldfish rested upon each clean desk. And over the PA, the same system that had carried the sound of a breathless warning the day before, James Brown’s I feel good (whoa! I feel good, I knew that I would, now) began to play. I bit my lip to stop myself from crying.

Then, and still now, that song blaring over the speakers strikes me as abhorrently insensitive, as does the way the administration failed and refused to openly discuss the incident with students. We had all crouched in dim corners. We had listened to each other’s shallow breath. We had murmured prayers and sent messages to who we loved. But we were expected to move on as if nothing had happened. To pass our standardized tests. To forget the fear of those moments when we didn’t know who might barge through our classroom door.

In the years since then, I have felt in some ways as though part of me is still there, frozen, like an animal of prey. When I teach, I survey each room for exit points or furniture I might use to block the entrance. I want to tell each student in my class that I will protect them, but I want more safety for all of us than just the promise of my own words. I do not want to see any more school shooting headlines. I do not want students to have to show their bravery after unspeakable horrors. I do not want them to carry that trauma.

Rather than ignore what has happened — and is still happening — to students in too many high schools as the administration at mine did, I believe in the importance of stories of students, teachers, staff, their families, and communities who have borne witness to tragedy, who will carry the weight of their experiences with them for the rest of their lives, and who are advocating for stricter gun laws as a means of sparing others from the same. We must listen.

1. Columbine, five years later (Peter Wilkinson, April 20, 2004, Salon)

At a news conference held just shy of the five-year anniversary of the Columbine High School tragedy, all evidence, “every bomb and bullet,” was placed on display. Peter Wilkinson maps the trajectory of the investigation in this piece, but emphasizes the experiences of survivors such as Brooks Brown, a student who experienced PTSD after the shooting, and Richie Castaldo, a student who was paralyzed because of a bullet that struck his T4 vertebra and “shattered his spinal cord.” Wilkinson chronicles how their lives — and others at the school — were impacted by that traumatic day.

“Ireland was paralyzed on his right side for months after the attack. He walked again in June 1999, though he’ll always carry a bullet in his brain from Klebold’s shotgun.”

2. After Newtown shooting, mourning parents enter into the lonely quiet (Eli Saslow, June 8, 2013, The Washington Post)

Six adult staff members and 20 children were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary in December, 2012, their families left to grapple with unspeakable loss. Eli Saslow tells the heart-wrenching story of Mark and Jackie Barden, whose Daniel was killed that day.

“Nobody had touched the foosball table, because Daniel had been the last to play. His books and toy trains sat in their familiar piles, gathering dust. The basement had always been Daniel’s space, and some days Mark believed he could still smell him here, just in from playing outside, all grassy and muddy.”

3. Chardon, Ohio (Libby Copeland, November 18, 2018, Esquire)

Six years after a school shooting at a high school in Chardon, Ohio, Libby Copeland shares the stories of Danny Day, a high school student at the time whose best friends were killed, Brandon Lichtinger, a teacher, Jen Sprinzl, the principal’s secretary who confronted the shooter in the hallway, and others within the community in order to convey the myriad ways that trauma can warp and change a life.

“That was when I started to understand just how deeply something like a school shooting could affect people—people who weren’t even in the school or who didn’t lose someone close to them. That it could be a kind of earthquake that still reverberates, six years later. That a whole town could be marked by this day and could send its young into the world marked, too—some of them drinking, depressed, cutting, suicidal.”

4. The Class of 1946-2018 (As told to Jared Soule and Amelia Schonbek, October 28, 2018, New York Magazine)

Through a portfolio of photographs and a collection of testimonies from survivors of school shootings, Jared Soule and Amelia Schonbek “wanted to conduct an exercise in remembrance…What, we wondered, could their memories teach us about our inattention? The people whose bodies — in many cases — won’t let them forget.”

“There was a girl who was praying in Spanish, and I thought maybe I should pray too. This is a time when you pray. So I did, and then I looked over and saw one of my classmates with her head down. Then I sort of realized that she wasn’t alive anymore.” –Isabel Chequer

“Somebody was running past me and I asked them real quick, “Whose blood is this?” And they said, “It’s yours. It’s yours. You have a bullet hole in your neck.”” –Rome Schubert

“Fragments of bullets are still getting pulled out of my body.” –Colin Goddard

5. The School Shooting Generation Has Had Enough (Charlotte Alter, March 22, 2018, Time)

Charlotte Alter writes about how, after the tragic school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, a group of students organized in the hopes of decreasing gun violence.

“How a movement catches fire is always a mystery, but the Parkland kids seem matched for this moment. They’re young enough to be victimized by a school shooting, but old enough to shape the aftermath.”

Alter notes that the “U.S. only has 4.4% of the world’s population, yet it accounts for roughly 42% of the world’s guns.” Up against startling statistics such as that, through social media engagement, meetings held at a pizzeria or the windowless rooms of the #NeverAgain headquarters, and with a fervent desire for change, Emma González, Jaclyn Corin, David Hogg, Alex Wind, and others hope to change the current state of gun violence in the U.S. through reform.

***

Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and illness.

Selling Vintage Records in Tokyo

All photos by Aaron Gilbreath

Aaron Gilbreath | Reprinted from the Fall 2015 issue of Kyoto Journal | December 2018 | 14 minutes (3,623 words)

 

Koya Abe spent most of the six minute long, 2011 Tōhoku earthquake keeping his 78rpm records from falling off the shelves. The delicate collectibles are stored in open-mouth crates mounted on the wall of his Tokyo record shop. As the Earth shifted four inches on its axis, Koya moved back and forth in front of the crates, pressing his hands to hundreds of wobbling, shellacked disks. “Instead of running away,” he told me, “I stayed here.” The 9.0 magnitude quake was the worst in Japan’s history. Nearly 16,000 people died, yet only two of Abe’s 78s fell. Despite his luck, he installed wooden beams across the racks to hold his discs in place during the next quake.

Named after an early 20th century black American harmonica player, Noah Lewis’ Records sits on the second floor of the kind of small, bland, white building that Americans would describe as suburban office park architecture. In urban Japan, commercial buildings’ exteriors don’t matter as much as what’s inside. Noah Lewis’ Records specializes in early jazz, blues, country, doo wop, R&B and rock and roll dating from the 1920s to the 1960s, a mix of American roots music that Abe devilishly calls “pre-Beatles.” He built his business around his musical tastes, instead of the indie pop and electronica that sells at Tower Records in Shibuya or at Jet Set down the street. In his “Rockin’ Instrumentals” section, you’ll find ’60s seven-inches like The Virtues’ “Blues in the Cellar,” The Marketts’ “Out of Limits” and the String-A-Longs’ “Twist Watch.” In the “50s-60s R&R Rockabilly” section, seven-inches like Johnny Dee & The Bluenotes’ “Teenage Queen.” (Lyrics: “Teenage queen, you’re everything that my heart ever dreamed.”) Albums by Decca, Capital and Sun are everywhere.

An average day finds Koya sipping a late-afternoon beer and playing Charlie Parker. The smell of cigarette smoke hangs in the air. He hunches behind the counter, entering new items into his website. The store is barely the size of a bedroom. The only open window is a narrow slit on the front door. The walls are covered with records and posters, sheet music and display cases. Koya’s work station is wedged in back, far from any trace of sunlight. An ashtray sits by the cash register. Nearby, a dusty VCR sits stacked atop a crate holding a broken record player.

Japan contains one of the world’s highest concentrations of jazz fans per capita. The famous Blue Note and Prestige labels keep many albums in print in Japan that they’ve let lapse in America. Used record stores are filled with original period vinyl, so jazz collectors from all over the world travel to Tokyo to score rarities. “People who go to other stores who cannot find what they are looking for come here,” Abe said. “Many Japanese musicians buy here. Many, many collectors. They are mostly men in their forties.” In his experience, Japan’s most ardent jazz fans were men ranging from their forties and eighties, though a surprising number of young men and young women were into the music, too, far more than in America.

He listed stock online, but web business wasn’t his main one. Customers preferred to come to the store. His many regulars used the website to browse before visiting or calling in their order.
Read more…

The Case for Letting Malibu Burn

AP Photo/Ringo H.W. Chiu

Mike Davis | Ecology of Fear | Metropolitan Books | September 1998 | 20 minutes (5,921 words)

 

“Homes, of course, will arise here in the thousands. Many a peak will have its castle.”

—John Russell McCarthy, These Waiting Hills (1925)

 

Late August to early October is the infernal season in Los Angeles. Downtown is usually shrouded in acrid yellow smog while heat waves billow down Wilshire Boulevard. Outside air-conditioned skyscrapers, homeless people huddle miserably in every available shadow.

Across the Harbor Freeway, the overcrowded tenements of the Westlake district—Los Angeles’s Spanish Harlem—are intolerable ovens. Suffocating in their tiny rooms, immigrant families flee to the fire escapes, stoops, and sidewalks. Anxious mothers swab their babies’ foreheads with water while older children, eyes stinging from the smog, cry for paletas: the flavored cones of shaved ice sold by pushcart vendors. Shirtless young men—some with formidable jail-made biceps and mural-size tattoos of the Virgin of Guadalupe across their backs—monopolize the shade of tienda awnings. Amid hundreds of acres of molten asphalt and concrete there is scarcely a weed, much less a lawn or tree.

Thirty miles away, the Malibu coast—where hyperbole meets the surf—basks in altogether different weather. The temperature is 85°F (20 degrees cooler than Downtown), and the cobalt blue sky is clear enough to discern the wispish form of Santa Barbara Island, nearly 50 miles offshore. At Zuma surfers ride the curl under the insouciant gazes of their personal sun goddesses, while at Topanga Beach, horse trainers canter Appaloosas across the wet sand. Indifferent to the misery on the “mainland,” the residents of Malibu suffer through another boringly perfect day.

Read more…

The Need for Distance: Jaclyn Gilbert on Writing and Running

Mikolette / Getty

Jacqueline Alnes | Longreads | December 2018 | 11 minutes (2,773 words)

Early in the morning, the light soft and warm and the air cool after yesterday’s thunderstorms, Jaclyn Gilbert runs a new route. From Grand Army Plaza she makes her way toward the Green Wood cemetery, hugging it through the second mile. Around the fifth mile, she passes over a parkway through a cylindrical barbed-wire tunnel, peering down at cars whirring by on their morning commutes, before continuing down Tenth Avenue back toward the park, finishing at Grand Army for a clean seven miles.

“New routes are always my favorite for the maps they form inside me: a series of sense impressions that filter through my memory as the day passes on. When I sit down to write again, these impressions reappear as remnants of light, color, or feeling, making their way into the imaginings of my characters,” Gilbert writes to me in an email. Though we live half the country apart — she in New York, I in Oklahoma — I feel a connection to her. Both of us are former Division I athletes turned writers. And both of us still run, frequently testing our limits; our writing processes are informed by our fastidious need for distance. Read more…

Seventeen

Kristina Servant / Flickr CC

Steve Edwards | Longreads | December 2018 | 19 minutes (5,135 words)

I don’t remember the therapist’s name, only that he had closely cropped silver hair, a soft voice, and kind, deep-set eyes. He was a postdoc in the psychology department — whatever that meant. He wanted me to know that our sessions would be recorded and could be included in his dissertation — whatever that meant — and would I be OK with that? I said sure. He smiled and studied my face. It was September, a smell of rain in the air. One of those evenings when the dark sets in early and surprises you.

I’d just started my senior year of high school but had already been accepted to Purdue, which was only a half hour from home and where my brother had enrolled two years prior. I’d been to campus once or twice to go to parties with him. But I’d never been there by myself. I’d never been inside the psych building.

My mother set up the meeting. I didn’t know what I wanted to study, and she thought the university would have career counselors. She looked up counseling services in the phone book and made an appointment.

It was an honest mistake. Like the time I told her I needed a cup for baseball and she’d bought me a plastic drinking cup. She hadn’t been to a four-year university. My father, who had earned a degree in chemistry from Eastern Illinois, wasn’t any help with administrative tasks and probably wouldn’t have known any different either. What other kinds of counseling services besides career counseling would there be at a university? And I went along with it because that’s what I did: I floated like a cloud through my life. If my parents thought I needed to be somewhere and do something, I went there and did it. Not out of duty so much as out of a desire to avoid conflict. The thought of fighting over things I didn’t care about depressed me.

And I went along with it because that’s what I did: I floated like a cloud through my life…Not out of duty so much as out of a desire to avoid conflict. The thought of fighting over things I didn’t care about depressed me.

If anything, however, I thought maybe counseling services could help me choose a major, which apparently was important. I’d looked at the lists when we filled out the application, and most of them seemed terrible. Economics. Accounting. Some I didn’t even know what they were. Sophomore year of high school we’d taken a long fill-in-the-blank aptitude test to help us identify future careers. One question asked if we liked to be outside. I said yes and was told I should be a farmer. But even I knew that that wasn’t how farming worked. I felt duped by the test and wrote it off, like I’d already written off most of school. It was all one big time suck, state-sanctioned babysitting until we turned 16. None of my teachers seemed happy with their lives and careers. Better not to even think about it.

The therapist asked me a few questions about myself and I answered them. I’d grown up in a tiny town not far from campus. My folks were still married, and both worked — my mom as a doctor’s assistant and my dad for a pharmaceutical plant — and my brother went to school here. We were in a band together. I played bass.

“You’re interested in thinking more about choosing a major. Thinking about a career,” the therapist said. “Yes?”

“I guess.”

“What sounds good?”

“I want to be a poet,” I said.

He nodded thoughtfully and wrote something in his notebook. When he looked up again, I said if not a poet, a rock star.

“A musician?”

“Sure.”

He nodded again, wrote more in his notebook. I glanced around the room, which was square and sterile, lit by a fluorescent light, the walls a soft neutral tone. I had no idea where the camera that was recording us was located.

Over the next hour, as we kept chatting, the questions got surprisingly personal. But what did I care — I floated. If this was what I was here to do, might as well get it over with. Might as well tell the truth. Did I believe in God? Sure. Was I sexually active? Yes. Or at least I had been. Had I ever considered suicide? Yes. What was the occasion? Some nights, I said, just out driving, I thought about popping my seatbelt and steering into oncoming traffic. What kept you from doing it? I didn’t know. I didn’t want to hurt anybody else. And I guess, honestly, I just wanted to see how everything was going to end. He wrote it all down. This was a far cry from the fill-in-the-blank aptitude test I took sophomore year. I kept looking around the room, my armpits sweating. Wherever they had hidden the camera it was very discreet.


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That I would accidentally end up in therapy was emblematic of my life at 17. Things just seemed to happen to me, and out of curiosity and boredom I went along with them. Other people were such mysteries. I would watch my parents and teachers and kids at school and wonder why they did the things they did or thought the things they thought. It all seemed arbitrary. And no matter how long or deep my ruminations, I got no closer to understanding. The path of least resistance became my mode. I rolled my jeans, wore only certain brands of shoes, combed my hair how everybody else combed theirs. I wasn’t a conformist in hopes of attaining some higher social status. Rather, it was the easiest way not to care. I had music and TV shows and being outside and reading if the book was any good. Maybe someday I’d get motivated.

That I would accidentally end up in therapy was emblematic of my life at 17.

***

I hadn’t known Rachel Thompson well when we started going together the previous spring. She was a grade behind me. She ran cross-country and was a junior varsity cheerleader, and when she and her friend got dumped by their boyfriends mere weeks before prom, they approached my best friend and me about double dating. It was only after agreeing that I learned Rachel had something of a reputation.

“You play your cards right,” my friend whispered to me conspiratorially over the phone one night, “and you could end up getting laid.”

I didn’t hate the idea.

How many times had I paused in the crowded hallways at school and watched girls rushing to and from class, laughing, books in their arms, and wondered — sadly, self-pityingly — if any of them wanted it as badly as I did?

But I wasn’t enough of an asshole to commiserate about something like that with my friend on the phone. Or at least not about a specific person. Or maybe I’m getting it all wrong in the remembering and we were always talking about girls at school, objectifying them, talking up the things we would do if given the chance. Maybe I didn’t commiserate on the phone that night with my friend because this time it was about me.

Rachel Thompson lived in a little farmhouse way off in the country. School consolidation in our rural Indiana county put 25 miles of cornfields and grain silos between us, distance enough that every trip out felt like a journey. Her dad worked at a factory in town and was missing his front teeth but wore partials. Her mom was friendly and frail, a special ed teacher where I’d gone to middle school. They had a biological son who was 21 and already married, and Rachel, who they’d adopted as a baby. They loved each other and were a happy family and they welcomed me as one of their own straight away. The day of prom I came dressed in my tux and with a corsage to pin to Rachel’s dress, and everyone was there, all smiles and warmth and good cheer. Her brother had a camcorder and kept ribbing me about being unable to get the corsage on right until finally her mother stepped in and straightened things out.

I liked the Thompsons, and I liked Rachel. In the weeks after prom, we spent more and more time together. We were both on the track team and would hold hands and talk on the long bus rides home from away meets. On the weekends, I’d drive out to her house and watch movies on TV with her and her folks, and afterwards we’d hang out in the living room alone. They had a piano. She’d play and sing “The Rose” and “From a Distance” by Bette Midler. I loved the warmth of her voice, the way it filled the whole house.

“Play your cards right and you could end up getting laid,” my friend had said. But he didn’t know how she played the piano. Neither did I. I couldn’t have anticipated the intimacy of those performances in her living room. The occasional missed chord followed by a correction. Her voice reaching up for a note.

Being around her made me feel like a different person. Or maybe more like myself. As though I didn’t have to blend in or hide. As though I was worth something for no other reason than that I was here and we were together.

‘Play your cards right and you could end up getting laid,’ my friend had said. But he didn’t know how she played the piano. Neither did I. I couldn’t have anticipated the intimacy of those performances in her living room. The occasional missed chord followed by a correction. Her voice reaching up for a note.

We used to listen to Pink Floyd late at night. We made out to it sometimes, too, down in my folks’ basement. I didn’t understand the meaning of the lyrics, just that they were meaningful. The way a line could lift me out of myself and remake me. The way kissing Rachel could lift me out of myself and remake me. I felt stupidly lucky. Happy. What had I done to make any of this happen? I had no idea. And I didn’t care. I couldn’t see a single advantage to thinking too much and somehow jinxing it all.

I remember one afternoon we were driving some empty county road listening to the radio and talking as the cornfields whizzed past. Rachel reached over and lay a hand on my thigh. I glanced at her, smiling, uncertain. She stared straight ahead. As I kept driving, she inched her hand over until she was holding me with it. Everything got quiet. The music and the fields swam away from us. I pressed on the accelerator — 60, 70, 80 mph. Nothing had ever felt as thrilling. Then she laughed. And I laughed. Finally we came to a stoplight at an intersection with another highway and she took her hand back.

“Don’t think bad of me,” she said.

“Why would I?”

“For that.”

“I don’t,” I said. “I liked it.”

I never thought bad of Rachel — for anything. She knew what she wanted, and people who knew what they wanted fascinated me. How did they know? Was there something they understood about the world that I didn’t? Some anxious part of me always feared I was living life the wrong way. The thought of screwing up paralyzed me. Even as a kid, my family had called me “Lump” because rather than jump into the action, I sat back and studied the other kids and only joined the fun when I knew it was safe.

Rachel didn’t need a career counselor or to take an aptitude test. After high school she was going to enroll in a two-year associates degree and then work as an administrative assistant. She already typed 70 words per minute and with practice could reach 100 or 110. She had a starting salary in mind, a neighborhood where she wanted to live. I’d listen to her tell me these things and marvel at her confidence.

I didn’t know what I wanted. I didn’t even really know my options. I figured I’d go to college and see what happened. That had been the only real story my parents had pushed on me — go to college. We didn’t talk about what it would be like or what I might do once I was there. One night my mother was helping me fill out my application. I had to check a box for a major as part of the process. I mentioned Creative Writing, the only thing on the list that looked halfway interesting. My mother pointed to the major right above it: Communication. She thought liberal arts majors all took pretty much the same classes and said communication might sound better on a résumé. We were sitting at the kitchen table. She looked up at me, pen poised and ready. “OK,” I said. “Communication.”

Some anxious part of me always feared I was living life the wrong way. The thought of screwing up paralyzed me.

I didn’t want to argue because on some level it didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to convince her and I didn’t want go to the trouble of trying. It was easier to concede. But beneath that expedience opened a sinkhole of unacknowledged truth. I didn’t want to share that part of my life — my private thoughts and feelings, my hopes and dreams and vulnerabilities — with her. Or with anyone. It didn’t feel safe. There is plenty of poetry in small-town Indiana but there aren’t many poets there to sing it. For years, on instinct, I stuffed down my emotions, hid my heart away, kept secret the million delicious melancholies a poet perceives before language arrives to set them free. Part of the reason people who knew what they wanted fascinated me was that I couldn’t figure out how they dealt with the pain of being so exposed. Or didn’t they feel what I felt inside? The burden of some fragile, unacknowledged gift. A sense of life’s utter strangeness. Life’s brutality and grace. What I had learned was to blend in, to keep perfectly still. If no one knew me, no one could hurt me.

But at the same time, I was desperate to be known. On long drives through the country, or after we’d made out on the couch in her living room, I’d spill my guts to Rachel, talking music, telling stories about my family, sharing poems I’d written in a journal. And I’d ask questions, too, and listen to her answers. She was kind, thoughtful, funny. That she could so easily be herself had opened up space for me to do the same. And she never judged me. I remember when we finally had sex — my first time — she didn’t laugh at how quickly it was all over. Or she laughed but not in a bad way. She said, “You’re kidding, right?” but seemed more amused than anything, and after a few minutes we tried again with greater success. It was tentative and awkward and fun and sweet.

Afterward, we got dressed and drove to her brother’s house for a family picnic and kept looking at each other, sharing glances. I realized half the fun of sex was knowing you’d had it, the secret in your smile. Though maybe if anyone in her family had really looked at us just then they’d have known. And that was the other exciting part I hadn’t considered — the work of keeping it a secret. Her hulking factory-worker father with the missing front teeth, giant teddy bear though he was to Rachel, could have crushed me like a beer can. But I was too dumb and happy to be afraid. I piled baked beans and hot dogs and potato salad onto a plate.

The one person I told, a friend since kindergarten who I knew I could trust, said, “Have you even told her you love her yet?”

“No,” I said.

“Do you?” he said.

The question surprised me. I hadn’t considered it once in the whole time Rachel and I had been hanging out. It felt beside the point. Of course I loved her. Did I have to say it for her to know? Had I made a mistake by not saying it? Had I broken some unspoken rule? It pained me to think I’d messed something up without even knowing.

The next time we had sex I whispered “I love you” in her ear. She didn’t say it back. She sighed and said, “You’re sweet.”

Of the two of us, Rachel was the sweet one. I remember on her dad’s birthday, she wanted to surprise him at work so we hit Taco Bell and Burger King and McDonald’s, got him a big bag full of his favorite fast food treats for lunch. He worked on the shop floor at Alcoa, an aluminum supplier. When he came out to greet us he was sweating and streaked with grease. And at first he thought something was wrong — what were we doing there? Then she handed him the bag and he looked inside. Tacos. Burgers. A hot apple pie. The look on his face as he realized she’d gone to all those different places for him. I thought he might cry right on the spot.

The next time we had sex I whispered ‘I love you’ in her ear. She didn’t say it back. She sighed and said, ‘You’re sweet.’

My dad worked in a factory, too — a pharmaceutical plant — but I’d never taken him lunch as a surprise. I hardly even knew what he did there all day long. Family meant something more to Rachel. On one of those nights she’d played the piano and sung for me, we ended up snuggling on the couch. She told me about her biological mother.

“All I know about her,” she said, “was that she was morbidly obese. So I have to watch myself. That’s all I really know.”

We’d had sex several times, but I’d never felt closer to her, or more overwhelmed by tenderness, than in that moment. It was how she said I love you back.

One Sunday night in early summer, I went with the Thompsons and some of their friends to a carnival a half hour down the road in Crawfordsville. Rachel had been coming to the carnival, she said, for as long as she could remember. It reminded me of the county fair I’d gone to every summer when I was a kid and would stay for a few weeks with my grandparents in Illinois. It made me think about how inside Rachel was a whole world of memories and experiences, and that I was lucky for a glimpse. That night we walked the fairway holding hands. Barkers called for us to toss softballs into milk canisters, pitch pennies onto plates. Swells of melodic pipe organ music spilled from the carousel. Kids spun themselves dizzy on a Tilt-A-Whirl. I remember looking up at the Ferris wheel — this giant spinning disc of light against the night’s darkness — and how, at the very top, an empty seat rocked back and forth. The poet in me knew it meant something but I wasn’t sure what. For a moment, I felt unaccountably sad and alone, even though there were people all around and I was in love.

***

In mid-July, Rachel and I spent a week apart — and at 17, a week is a long time. Led by my mother and a friend, my church youth group attended the Presbyterian Youth Triennium at Purdue, where some 5,000 kids from around the country swarm campus for seven days of fellowship and singing and sharing ideas.

It was something to do the way going to church was something to do. Every Sunday I dutifully got up, got dressed, and endured boring Sunday school lessons and sermons and droned along with the hymns. I liked some of the stories, like when Jesus turned over the money changers’ tables in the temple, but the supernatural stuff left me cold and I instinctively hated people’s moralism and judgmental attitudes. Part of every service was a prayer the congregation read aloud. The gist was to acknowledge our selfishness and insufficiency, our pettiness, our weakness, the stain of sin made manifest through our desires.

It fetishized shame.

I remember always wondering why we should apologize for being human when we’d never asked to be born. And if God made these bodies of ours, why deny ourselves the pleasure or pain of inhabiting them?

On the first night of Triennium, everyone gathered in Purdue’s Elliot Hall of Music. It was crowded and noisy, more like a rock concert than a church service. “Brown-Eyed Girl” played over the loudspeakers and kids my age — several thousand of them — sang and swayed and hung off each other. I didn’t know what to think, only that I liked it. And whatever it was that allowed them to so freely express themselves — I wanted it.

Over the course of the week, I met kids from California, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Hawaii. They were vibrant and energized. They talked about travel, music, movies, art, poetry, philosophy. Things no one had ever really talked to me about before — or at least not with that intensity. Learning about their lives gave me a glimpse of something beyond Indiana and its cornfields and grain silos and empty railroad tracks, and beyond boring hymns and the weekly recitation of my inadequacies at church. What if instead of being passive and private and cautious, I became joyful and engaged with life like these people I was meeting? What did I have to lose?

What if instead of being passive and private and cautious, I became joyful and engaged with life like these people I was meeting? What did I have to lose?

Rachel and I spoke by phone once or twice that week. It was hard to explain to her what was happening inside of me. I didn’t have the words yet. And I felt guilty. Anxious. A feeling had begun to creep over me that I’d been dishonest with her somehow, that maybe I hadn’t really loved her but only been interested in sex. If I was going to be joyful and free, I had to look at myself clearly. I had to be honest. That I wanted sex at all felt like an indictment enough against my character to prove I was capable of using someone for it. I don’t know. It was irrational. Somehow feeling excited about a new life seemed a betrayal of the old.

I remember driving out to see her the day after Triennium ended. We laid in a hammock in her backyard and I probably sounded like a lunatic trying to convey to her how spiritually enlightened I felt. That night we had dinner and watched a movie with her folks. After they went to bed we made out on the couch.

“Do you think,” Rachel said breathlessly in my ear, “that you’d come right away … I mean, if we just put it in for a second?”

“Yes.”

“You would?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Probably.”

We sat up and straightened our clothes. Her curly hair glinted in the lamp light, the ends all frazzled. She was pretty. She smelled like fresh laundry. It seemed like maybe a thousand years since her mom had helped me pin the corsage to her prom dress.

We broke up at the end of July, during the Tippecanoe County 4-H fair. I don’t recall exactly what Rachel’s involvement had been with the fair but her being there meant we didn’t see each other or talk on the phone much, and with that on the heels of my week away, an inevitable drift set in. I remember feeling secretly grateful for the time apart. Since that night at her house after Triennium, I’d only started to feel more guilty and anxious about our having had sex. It had nothing to do with her but with me. It had nothing to do with sex. Or God. Rather, it was the part of my psyche obsessed with protecting itself from hurt. I don’t know how to explain it, only that it’s always been there, a dark current in my thoughts. The most generous interpretation I can give it is to say that it wielded shame like a weapon in a misguided attempt to save me from myself. It raised doubts. It lied. It preferred the cold certainty of loneliness over the chaos of love. I was too confused to say anything to Rachel, to even try to talk things through. Instead, I said nothing. I stopped acting like her boyfriend and waited for her to break up with me.

The night she called and suggested we hang out with other people, I quickly agreed. She said it just seemed like we were in different places right now. She was confused but not upset, or at least not outwardly so. I said she should enjoy being at the fair. She should have fun and hang out with whomever she wanted.

After we hung up, I waited to feel something, but nothing came. A coldness, maybe. There had been guys in her life before me, and there would be guys in her life after me. That’s what I told myself to assuage my guilt. I had chosen fear over her.

The last time I saw Rachel that summer was in my parents’ kitchen a few weeks before school started. She stopped by to drop off a T-shirt or something I’d left at her house. She talked for a while with my folks and my brother, and then we were alone.

“My period came,” she said.

My cheeks burned.

“Good,” I said.

She had told me when we first started having sex that the physicality of her cross-country training meant that sometimes her period skipped a month but not to worry about it. It startled me to have already forgotten to worry. Meanwhile, the whole last month, she had been wondering if she could be carrying my baby.

“It’s weird, isn’t it?” she said, pushing a glass of iced tea from one hand to another. “To think that we used to do that?”

“No.”

“It’s not weird?”

“It’s not weird,” I said.

But I said it in a way that meant I didn’t want to keep talking about this — not if it was going to hurt. In that moment I was the human equivalent of a closed door. I thought the best thing for both of us was to pretend nothing had happened. I couldn’t look her in the eye. I said again it wasn’t weird, and that she shouldn’t feel bad. She stared into her glass of iced tea. If there was more she wanted to say, she kept it to herself. She said she should probably go. I said OK.

A therapist might have been able to help me sort through the complexity of such a moment and find some compassion for myself. A therapist might have inquired into the circumstances and early life events that made turning into the human equivalent of a closed door seem like my best option. I could also have used a therapist to process my return to earth after the high of my spiritual awakening. Maybe I’d had a vision of some new possibility for a life outside Indiana and the narrow walls of my thinking, but I still had a year of high school to get through. I spent most of it goofing off, playing guitar, pretending I was some kind of poet by reciting “The Waste Land” in speech class. It made me feel important to tell a room of my peers that April was the cruelest month. Who cared what it meant?

In the process, I might have seen Rachel more clearly, too. At 17 I didn’t understand how much our culture hates women, that a woman couldn’t want sex — the same thing I wanted — without paying a price. I thought if I loved her none of that mattered. I thought being nice was enough. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that I carefully avoided thinking about those things. Nothing in my training for manhood required it.

At 17 I didn’t understand how much our culture hates women, that a woman couldn’t want sex — the same thing I wanted — without paying a price. I thought if I loved her none of that mattered. I thought being nice was enough. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that I carefully avoided thinking about those things.

I remember in the hallway at school one day that fall, Rachel’s ex-boyfriend came up and slapped me on the back and said, “Know why we go out with girls like Rachel? Because they like to fuck.”

He said it matter-of-factly, without a trace of rancor or vengeance. As I recall, he was smiling, practically congratulating me. In my naivete, I chalked it up to his just being an asshole, end of story. Across the years, however, what I see is a boy convincing himself — and trying to convince me — that fucking is all women are for. There aren’t enough therapists in the world to fix what’s wrong with men like that.

I’ve had the good fortune of returning to therapy as an adult — on purpose this time — and one of the questions my therapist likes to ask is what I’d say so my former self if I could. What would I like for him to know in moments of hardship or stress? And I’m always shocked when the answer arrives, some bit of simple wisdom that was inside me all along. That to be human is to hurt. That love is worth the suffering it brings. But really all I want to do is put my arm around him and tell him to buck up, maybe read him a poem by somebody who’s still alive. I want him to know nobody’s perfect and there’s a chance every day to make things right if you fuck up. And I want to thank him for that image of the empty seat at top of the Ferris Wheel, which has become a talisman for my intention to open myself to things I don’t understand. “You did your job,” I want to tell him. “You got me here.”

Not that I know for sure how that all happened. I had maybe three sessions with the kind-eyed “career counselor” at Purdue before I figured out that we weren’t really talking about careers. And I think it surprised him at the end of that third session when I announced I would no longer be coming to see him. He was surprised but didn’t try to convince me to stay. He said he thought I was very mature for my age, and that I had a bright future ahead of me. I felt bad and hoped I wasn’t letting him down. I didn’t want to mess up his research and writing. But I could tell from his questions about my life, and from his genuine interest in the answers, that if we kept talking he was going to make me feel things I didn’t want to feel. I wasn’t ready for that. I didn’t know if I’d ever be ready. What kind of comfort was there in confronting the things that hurt you? The times you’d been cruel or the victim of cruelty? What could possibly be gained by diving into the question of why you wanted the things you wanted? The longer I could put off that conversation the better, even if some part of me knew it was inevitable. What I wanted at 17 was to glide just a little longer in the safety of my childhood. What I wanted was to float. And that’s what I did, out of his office into the dark of another September night.

***

Steve Edwards is author of Breaking into the Backcountry, a memoir of his time as the caretaker of a wilderness homestead in southern Oregon. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife and son.

***

Editor: Krista Stevens

Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Writing to Avoid Erasure

Photo courtesy the author

Aram Mrjoian | Longreads | November 2018 | 11 minutes (2624 words)

On the periphery of Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the basement of my parents’ house, resting on a pool table among spare tools, mildew-stained textbooks, and model trains, I recently found an overstuffed manila envelope fraying at the edges. Official letterhead from Wayne State University is stamped in the upper left corner. If not for the message written at the center, where an address would usually be scribbled out, it would be unassuming. Instead, penciled in neat capital letters, a message to my father reads:

MARC,

NEVER FORGET

NEVER FORGIVE

DAD,

3-30-88

The note’s lack of punctuation seems almost intentional, as if the author wanted the statement to remain open-ended. I was born 15 months after the date, late June of the following year. The well-informed historian might use context clues to gather what the folder holds. For me, as the author of this essay, my name, along with Wayne State University’s rough location, provide esoteric hints as to the envelope’s contents, but for the average reader there’s not enough to go on to come to a confident conclusion.

Q: So what’s in the folder?

A: Decades worth of newspaper clippings about the Armenian genocide.

Old school Armenians can be, to put it lightly, unwavering in their grudges. My grandfather, having been born in the United States to parents who fled Armenia as the Ottoman Empire attempted to murder their families, remained passionate in his hatred of Turkey until he passed away from complications of a heart attack in 1997, when I was 8 years old. I don’t know what year he began collecting newspaper clippings prior to 1988. I didn’t browse the articles in detail, because they’re not for me. At least, not yet.
Read more…

Home Field Disadvantage

Team USA and Canada face off during the super round of the Women's Baseball World Cup 2018 in Viera, Florida at USSSA Space Coast Stadium on Wednesday, August 29, 2018. (Cassi Alexandra for Longreads)

Kelsey McKinney | Longreads | November 2018 | 24 minutes (6,164 words)

The moment the members of Team USA disembarked their plane in Orlando, their fears were realized. This was the first Women’s Baseball World Cup ever played on United States soil, and they expected to be ignored.

At the last World Cup, played in 2016 in South Korea, Team USA didn’t make it to the final round of the only competition they ever play in. But at least in Korea they had been acknowledged. More than that, they’d felt important and beloved, barraged by reporters’ questions at every turn and hounded by fans: fans holding handmade signs with sparkling lettering, fans who knew their names and numbers, fans who sent love notes down to the dugout in the middle of their games.

For every day of the past two years each woman had trained, practiced, and dreamed about playing baseball. According to USA Baseball, the members of the U.S. women’s national baseball team are among the top 20 players in the country, but here at home, almost no one knows they exist.

“Everywhere we travel [in the States] we are in our USA jumpsuits and matching stuff, and everyone just thinks we’re the soccer team,” Marti Sementelli, a pitcher for Team USA, said before the tournament. “Everyone on our team is worried about what the atmosphere at the World Cup will be like.”

They were the hosts, after all, to 11 teams of women just like them, women who fought their way into a sport that constantly tried to push them out. As talented as any professional, they’d asked for time off work and school to play. They deserved a crowd. But they knew better than to expect one. No games sold out, and only two had more than 600 people in attendance.

Everyone on our team is worried about what the atmosphere at the World Cup will be like.

The World Cup took place over 10 days of oppressively muggy, late August Florida heat about an hour southeast of Orlando. Viera, Florida, is a sleepy, suburban town built on a swamp, where preteens drive around in golf carts. This is where the best women’s baseball in the world was played — not in Orlando or Miami, but in a town even people from Florida have never heard of.  

Team USA hadn’t won the gold since 2006, and had flopped in 2016, but this was home territory. Despite a lifetime of roadblocks, Team USA knew they were good enough to beat all the odds. Win gold here, several players hoped before the tournament began, and maybe — finally — Americans might pay attention, might notice how hard they are working for so little.

The USA women’s baseball team prepare to face Canada during the super round of the Women’s Baseball World Cup 2018 in Viera, Florida at USSSA Space Coast Stadium on Wednesday, August 29, 2018. (Cassi Alexandra for Longreads)

Before Team USA played Team Japan, the defending, five-time World Champions, on the first night of the tournament’s second round, a five-year-old girl threw a ball back and forth with her father just outside the stadium. She wore a glove, and he caught her lobs with his bare hands. She said she wanted to play baseball. Her father said “hell yeah,” he’d let her play. “If she wants to fight for it, I’ll fight with her.” But to play baseball as a woman in America, you have to be willing to fight your entire life, because at every phase, you’re set up to fail.  

The Women’s Baseball World Cup is a relatively new tournament. Inaugurated in 2004, it takes place every two years. In the first week, 12 teams compete in groups and the top half of each group moves on to the Super Round. Every team in the Super Round plays the others once, and those standings determine which teams go to the gold medal and bronze medal games. This year, Japan, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Canada, Chinese Taipei, and Team USA made the Super Round. Ranked third coming into the tournament, Team USA hoped to medal after a disappointing performance in 2016.


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But they were at a disadvantage compared to teams like Japan and Canada, who practice together more than a month a year. The members of Team USA meet each other at tryouts, and train for five days together before the 10-day series. Returning players remember each other from past years, and a few weekends a year some former players fly to a common location to work together. But self-funded trainings aren’t officially organized, they’re the product of ambition and frustration.

It’s no wonder when Team USA played Japan on the first night of the Super Round, they made a couple mental errors: a ball not thrown on a steal, a miscommunication at second base. They are a team in uniform, but not in time spent on the diamond. They haven’t been given the time or resources to become a team the way Japan has.

In 2009, Kenichi Kakutani, a wealthy Japanese business owner, invested heavily in women’s baseball in Japan after watching a baseball tournament for high school girls. He formed what would eventually be called the Japanese Women’s Baseball League (JWBL), a tiny, four-team league that has made Team Japan an absolutely dominant force, taking gold at every WBWC in the past decade. Because more than 25 private high schools in Japan had women’s baseball teams, the talent was there to fuel the league, and the league itself encouraged more private high schools to start teams.

At first, it can seem easy to be a girl on the big diamond in the United States. Malaika Underwood, who has been on Team USA for more than a decade, grew up in San Diego playing tee-ball with kids in her neighborhood. Her team, the Brown Bears, had girls and boys on it, at least for a little while. Through tee-ball, machine-pitch, coach-pitch, even kid-pitch, no one questioned that Underwood was a baseball player; she was great.

“About age twelve or thirteen, D-Day came,” she says. “I had to decide whether I was going to try and play baseball in high school, or switch to softball.” Many people pressured her to switch, to try and hit the bigger, yellow softball thrown underhand on a smaller field. “They weren’t doing it with any malintent; they wanted to support me,” she says. “But at the same time, softball was a totally different sport. No disrespect to softball, but I didn’t want to play that.”

Federal courts have ruled under Title IX that baseball and softball are separate sports and that girls cannot be excluded from baseball teams just because a softball team exists at the same school. Softball is played on a smaller field, with a different ball, and different rules. In softball, runners cannot take a lead off bases. With a runner firmly on base, an infielder has to change her entire job, watch the pitcher for a throw-over, watch the runner for a steal, maybe even change her positioning. Without lead offs, there are far fewer steals, no balks, and far less nuance. “People come up to me and tell me on a daily basis that I should switch to softball,” Sementelli says. “You have to be the only girl on the team, or you have to switch to softball. It takes a lot for a little girl to fight to play on the big field.”

No disrespect to softball, but I didn’t want to play that.

Many girls do leave baseball for softball, often because there doesn’t seem to be any other choice. Unlike women’s basketball or women’s soccer, there aren’t national leagues for women’s baseball in the United States at any level: not Little League, not in high school, not in college, and not professionally. There are very few teams for girls to play baseball on together. Former player Justine Siegal runs an organization called Baseball for All, which coordinates tournaments and programs for girls to play. Sunrise, Florida, has a girl’s travel baseball team. Washington, D.C., has a team of all girls that plays in a boys’ league. Major League Baseball introduced a Trailblazers series in 2017, which offers competitive play and coaching for about 100 girls under age 13. “We believe these were necessary steps to send a message to our larger baseball audience that softball isn’t the only option for girls and women to play our game.” Tony Reagins, who is the executive vice president of baseball and softball development for Major League Baseball, wrote via email.

According to data gathered by Baseball for All, approximately 100,000 girls play baseball at the junior level making up about 2 percent of total players. Girls are playing baseball, or at least they want to. The problem isn’t demand; it’s supply. There are only a handful of opportunities for girls to play in the United States.

“The Trailblazers series is a great start,” Jennifer Ring, professor of political science at the University of Nevada and author of Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don’t Play Baseball, says. “[MLB] needs to make it known publicly that they want girls to play baseball. Not to play baseball in the major leagues, but to play professionally. I think if MLB really developed girls Little Leagues and youth leagues and added their brand to various tournaments throughout the country, it would take off.”

Playing baseball as a girl after puberty is even more difficult, because the game becomes entrenched in the school system. Underwood wrote letters to five high school baseball programs at magnet high schools she could attend with her baseball stats, and a single request: that she be given a fair chance to tryout for the team. Some coaches said no, the school had a softball team and she could play there; but a few schools said yes. Underwood went to the high school where she thought she’d have the best chance to play hardball. She played on the JV team her freshman and sophomore years, and her senior year started at second base on the varsity team.

“At ten years old, they tried to lie to keep me from playing in the league,” Ila Borders, a pitcher who was the first woman to win a game in a men’s professional baseball league, says. “I can tell you an instant where someone tried to keep me from playing every single year. When I was playing … I would have death threats.”

The USA women’s take batting practice ahead of their game against Canada during the super round of the Women’s Baseball World Cup 2018 in Viera, Florida at USSSA Space Coast Stadium on Wednesday, August 29, 2018. (Cassi Alexandra for Longreads)

By high school, most women still playing baseball are the only woman on their team. “Regardless of how much support you get, if you’re the only girl out there on the field, it’s pretty lonely,” Underwood says. “I had a supportive team and coaches all the way through high school, and it was still lonely.” According to a survey of high school athletics conducted by the National Federation of State High School Associations, almost half a million boys play baseball at the high school level. In the 2017–2018 school year, only 1,762 girls played baseball.

Puberty can also put girls at a disadvantage on teams and in leagues overwhelmingly populated by boys. “Growing up I was the fourth hitter and played shortstop, and now their testosterone has gone through the roof so I hit like seventh [or] eighth and play second,” Mia Valcke, who plays on Team Canada, says. “That’s the reality of being female in this sport. I’m still fighting and I’m competitive for sure, but it’s not the same.” When the only option is to play with boys, that isolation can kill a girl’s career.

Let’s say a young girl is willing to face all those battles and she wins. She plays varsity baseball in high school, loves the game. Maybe she even gets to attend the new Trailblazer series for women. “We have seen tremendous success in getting young men who have participated in our Breakthrough Series to play collegiately and so we wanted to apply the same approach for young women,” MLB’s Reagins says. There are no women’s baseball teams at any level of the American college system.

If a woman can reach the college level, she often can’t afford to fight her way onto a men’s team. Anna Kimbrell, a catcher for Team USA, played baseball through high school but switched to softball in college because she was offered a big scholarship to play. She returned to baseball after graduation. “You have to be pretty stubborn to refuse to play softball,” Ring says. “If you’re being rational and you want a college scholarship, it’s softball.”

Borders played baseball in college and describes it as “the toughest time in my life,” but also believes it taught her good instincts. “When girls switch over to play softball in college, they aren’t getting those four solid years of playing baseball,” she says. “Give me six collegiate teams in the U.S. and you can grow the sport, you can grow the talent right now.”

Underwood tried out for the national team for the first time in 2006. “I had no idea that this many girls and women played baseball,” she said when asked about her first tryout. She hadn’t played on a baseball team with another woman since Little League. That’s true for most of the women on Team USA. There are only 20 spots on the women’s national team. “One thing that hurts our team is we have these 16-year-olds that have so much potential [competing against] 28-year-old women who have trained and played college ball,” Veronica Alvarez, a coach for the 2018 Team USA and former player, says. “We lose them because they don’t make it at sixteen and then, because of the lack of opportunity, there’s nowhere else for them to go and play.”

For many ballplayers, the lack of funding keeps them from continuing their career. Borders played professional men’s baseball in independent leagues for three years. She had more than 50 innings, a 1.67 ERA, and a win: major league numbers. She could almost feel her name in blocky MLB uniform letters across her shoulder blades, but she was also poor. “I was homeless because I couldn’t afford rent. I couldn’t eat. I was sick and tired of it. I was tired of being broke,” Borders says. “Here I [was] doing all this really cool stuff, doing a lot of media, but they didn’t know that in the background I was dying.”

Give me six collegiate teams in the U.S. and you can grow the sport, you can grow the talent right now.

Borders did not play in this year’s World Cup because of a late injury, but doing so wouldn’t have earned her a paycheck anyway. None of the women on Team USA are paid to play. In fact, they lose money. They take vacation time from their jobs as firefighters and P.E. teachers, grad students and groundskeepers. Because there is no professional league for women in America, they have to earn paychecks from other jobs. Though most of Team USA’s baseball budget comes from MLB donations, it doesn’t go to the players. “We all make so many sacrifices to play,” Sementelli says. She notes that MLB players get paid millions of dollars to play baseball. “We would all play for a couple thousand dollars a month, just anything that would be some kind of income.”

No single entity is to blame for the century of decisions that have shut American women out of their own country’s pastime. But that also means that no one has to shoulder the responsibility to make this sport work for its players. The only institutions with the money and power to make a real, dramatic change in women’s baseball right now, though, are the WBSC and MLB.

By my count there were 42 people in the stands, not including press, to watch the Dominican Republic play Venezuela for the first game of the second day of the 2018 Super Round. It was 9 a.m. on a Wednesday, 90 degrees outside and almost 90 percent humidity. In the stands, Venezuela’s team chants ricocheted across sections of empty seats. The same was true for the 11 a.m. game, and again for three games on Thursday.

The Canadian women’s baseball team prepare for their game against Team USA during the super round of the Women’s Baseball World Cup 2018 in Viera, Florida at USSSA Space Coast Stadium on Wednesday, August 29, 2018. (Cassi Alexandra for Longreads)

Throughout the World Cup, the stadium remained  depressingly mostly empty. According to the World Baseball Softball Confederation (WBSC), the total official attendance for all 50 games was 17,969. That puts the average attendance for each game at 359 people. The USSSA Space Coast stadium seats approximately 8,000 people.  I attended the 11 Super Round games, and counted fewer than 100 people at six of them. There were two billboards for the event off the highway nearby but no flyers in local bars or grocery stores. No one I spoke to over six days in the surrounding area had any idea the tournament was going on. Girls who do play baseball around the country, on travel teams and boys teams, cannot come to watch these games because they are held during the first weeks of school.

“There were 5,000 people in the stands [at the 2015 Pan-American Women’s Baseball Tournament held in Toronto]. So, I expected at least that many here,” Carol Sheldon, who played women’s baseball for more than 20 years and is in the online-only National Women’s Baseball Hall of Fame, says. Despite several sold-out games in its first and last year to include it, the Pan American Games dropped women’s baseball from their bill for 2019 because of a “lack of interest.” No one on Team USA understands why the game was dropped when it had sell-out crowds, and the Pan American Games did not return multiple requests for comment.

“Obviously, you want a bigger crowd. Ideally, you want every game to be sold out,” says DJ Wabick, a national program director for the host organization, the United States Specialty Sports Association (USSSA), which is a sanctioning body for more than 85,000 baseball and softball teams in the country. USSSA provides rule guidelines and organizational support, but does not have power over the leagues. The WBSC sent the trophy on a tour of MLB stadiums to try to drum up attention. “We tried to share the stories of these players. That’s how you make a real connection with [the general public] and get them to care,” Wabick says.

Personal stories may help, but the same sort of yarns are told by announcers and PR offices in every sport to get fans to invest in individual players. But the sport sells itself. Baseball is a sport that people watch and love. The general public, everyone who cares about women’s baseball says, has no idea that women’s baseball exists.

Women’s baseball still has the diving catches, the home runs, and the bunts that make baseball a great sport, but it isn’t given the resources, financial or institutionally, to find fans.The infrastructure that pushes women out of baseball and into softball has also shaped the way the public thinks of the game. “It’s just ingrained in everybody’s head that when you think of a girl throwing a ball it’s a softball,” Sementelli says.“People just assume that we play softball even when I tell them that I throw overhand. It’s so frustrating.”

Fourteen current and former players at the Women’s World Cup told a version of the same anecdote. “I tell people all the time that I play for the USA women’s national baseball team,” Underwood says. “Ninety-five percent of the time they say ‘Oh, you mean softball?’”

That stereotype exists despite the fact that women have played baseball since the very beginning of its existence. Jennifer Ring argues in Stolen Bases that women played (and potentially even invented) an early ball-and-bat game called rounders that involved rocks being thrown at players to call them out. The first women’s professional team was the Dolly Vardens, one of two all-black women’s teams to play under the name in Philadelphia in the 1880s. Hall-of-famers Rogers Hornsby and Smoky Joe Wood received their first paychecks as professional players on teams with women. The full, 1908 version of the baseball anthem “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” is about a girl named Nelly Kelly who loved baseball.

American women had been playing baseball in organized leagues for three decades before softball was created in the 1890s. Organized semi-pro women’s baseball leagues in the 1920s were successful across race, class, and geographical lines. Women’s colleges like Smith and Wellesley easily filled teams to play each other. Only when the game became worth money in the late 19th century were women pushed out of the sport.

Pitcher Michelle Cobb warms up ahead of Team USA’s game against Canada during the super round of the Women’s Baseball World Cup 2018 in Viera, Florida at USSSA Space Coast Stadium on Wednesday, August 29, 2018. (Cassi Alexandra for Longreads)

Despite this deep history of women playing the game, though, the only reference point most Americans have for women in baseball is the 1992 movie A League of Their Own, which depicts the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL), which existed from 1943 to 1954 and had more than 600 female players. By my count, about a dozen former AAGPBL players attended the World Cup in Viera, Florida. They love women’s baseball. A few refused formal interviews because, they said, they wouldn’t have very many nice things to say about how the tournament was being run.

The two most prominent former AAGPL players to attend were Maybelle Blair, who played for the Peoria Redwings, and Shirley Burkovich, who played for the Rockford Peaches, the team popularized in A League of Their Own. At 91 and 85 years old, respectively, they were by far the most popular people at the tournament. They were constantly giving out hugs and signatures, and sat behind home plate to watch almost every game of the Super Round. They came, Blair told me, because they “wouldn’t miss women playing baseball for the world. There’s nothing like it.” From her seat behind the plate, Blair joked that she was going to go out there and pitch, that maybe she ought to go down to the dugout and talk to a team that couldn’t seem to stop making mental errors.

Before the United States played Canada on the second night of the Super Round, Blair and Burkovich made their way down to the field. Surrounded by a huddle of beaming Team USA players, holding her cane made out of a baseball bat, Blair pointed her finger up in their faces. “I flew all the way out here from California to see you guys win,” she said. “And I haven’t seen it yet.” That night, Team USA beat Canada 5–1.

Maybelle Blair, of the Rockford Peaches, gives the USA women’s baseball team a peptalk before facing the Canadian team during the super round of the Women’s Baseball World Cup 2018 in Viera, Florida at USSSA Space Coast Stadium on Wednesday, August 29, 2018. (Cassi Alexandra for Longreads)

Despite Burkovich and Blair’s popularity, and the excellent level of play on the field, women’s baseball still doesn’t get the media attention players feel they need to reach the next level. Every player past and present that I spoke with said that their number one concern for the future of the game is the lack of general awareness that they even exist. This year the Women’s Baseball World Cup made the SportsCenter Top 10 plays for the first time when Team USA second baseman Amanda “Red” Gianelloni snatched a smashed line drive out of the air and turned a hit into a double play. Before that play, the only time the tournament had been mentioned on the program was when a player was struck in the leg by a stray bullet during the 2010 Cup in Venezuela, a year Team USA won bronze. No plays from any medal games have ever been featured on SportsCenter.

All media loves when one woman plays baseball. As a child, Sementelli says, there were always reporters who wanted to talk to her, media on the sidelines of her Little League game. As soon as she got out of coach-pitch, her dad molded her into a pitcher. “I didn’t know any other girls playing,” she says. She went on CBS News and Jimmy Kimmel. “I say yes to every media outlet because I want people to know that there are women in this game.” She found a small college where she could play college baseball, and gave interviews there too. Alone, she’s been in the spotlight since 5 years old.

Borders’s story is even more extreme. She was covered so intensely and constantly by news outlets that the amount of media attention she received actually kept her from an opportunity to go to a MLB spring training camp. An MLB team wanted to give her a chance to tryout, but they didn’t want the cameras. Stories about women playing in men’s baseball leagues are constant. But when the women are successful together, the lights dim, the headlines fall away, and no one seems to care.

There’s no better example of this than Mo’ne Davis, who became the first girl to pitch a shutout in the Little League World Series in 2014 despite baseball not even being her favorite sport. She received massive media attention, but few stories mentioned that other girls had played in the LLWS before her. “If one more person says ‘in a league of her own’ I’m going to lose it,” Borders says. “Women have played baseball forever. Girls are playing now.” On August 19, 2014, Mo’ne Davis was on the cover of Sports Illustrated. On September 1, about two weeks later, Team USA competed in the Women’s Baseball World Cup in Japan and won silver. They did not get any cover stories, or even national recognition.

This is despite the reality that women’s baseball is just as exciting, and often more engaging, than the men’s game. “Baseball is the perfect sport for women if you really understand the game,” Borders says. “We like technicality, and the game within the game.” Women’s baseball is faster than men’s both because they only play seven innings and pitchers don’t wield as much control over the pace of the game. The women’s game is less ego-driven, and more democratic. It’s not a game fixated on home runs and shutouts. “Women have to play the game much more technically correct,” Sheldon says. It is a game of sacrifice — the sacrifice bunt, the sacrifice fly. The focus is on team success instead of individual feats.

If one more person says ‘in a league of her own’ I’m going to lose it. Women have played baseball forever. Girls are playing now.

But it still has fireworks. Before the tournament, WBSC constructed a mesh fence inside the stadium to shorten the field’s depth. Instead of playing on the world tournament–size field set by WBSC’s own regulations (275 and 290 feet in left and right field, 400 in center), the World Cup was played on a field 325 feet in every direction. According to a spokesperson from the WBSC, the field size was shrunk to make sure that the tournament had home runs. It didn’t need to be. On August 25 versus Venezuela, Megan Baltzell hit a ball 363 feet over both right field fences. That ball went further than two home runs hit the same night in Major League Baseball ballparks.

On the last night of play before the medal games, Team USA played the Dominican Republic. There was nothing they could do to make the gold medal game after Canada’s afternoon loss to Chinese Taipei. But they came out, scored six runs in the first inning, and beat the Dominican Republic 8–1. As the teams shook hands, the on-field announcer came on the p.a. system. “We hope to see you tomorrow for one or both games,” he said. “Should be some great softball tomorrow.”

“We were all shaking hands with our mouths gaping open,” Sementelli says. “He watched seven innings of baseball and then said softball. That was something that stuck out really firmly. I don’t know if that’s something that will ever change.”

The USA women’s baseball team face Canada during the super round of the Women’s Baseball World Cup 2018 in Viera, Florida at USSSA Space Coast Stadium on Wednesday, August 29, 2018. (Cassi Alexandra for Longreads)

The day before the medal games the media room smelled like spray paint. In the middle of the room stood a wooden box a little more than four feet tall, the sides still shiny with black paint. Around it, a pile of small gauge PVC pipes was scattered. “There are posters going on these. Don’t worry,” A WBSC employee told me. The next morning, the posters — printed in a dulled out yellow and maroon — had been sloppily pasted onto the box, crinkled at the corners. The top paper had an X drawn on it. It needed to be replaced. This was the podium for the trophy.

The medal games took place on a Friday. At 1 p.m. Team USA played Canada for the bronze medal. At 6 p.m. Chinese Taipei played Japan for the title of World Champion.

The USA vs. Canada game started off mild. After four innings, USA was up 2–0. But Canada staged a comeback, scored three runs, and in the bottom of the 7th, the United States came back to tie. The game went to extra innings where (according to rules of the Women’s World Cup) each half-inning started with runners placed on second and third. Still, the game went ten innings before Canada clinched the bronze medal, winning 8–5.

This was baseball at its best: incredible defensive plays, starting pitchers being brought in as relievers, a true rivalry that goes back a decade. To watch it, you would have either had to travel an hour outside of Orlando on a Friday in August, or have known to visit the WBSC’s YouTube page. None of the games of the Women’s Baseball World Cup were televised in the United States.

“I wish people could see this,” Sementelli says. “I shouldn’t have to worry about this…Do you think Bryce Harper is worried about whether or not his game will be on TV?”

“We tried very hard to get the games on television,” says the USSSA’s Wabick. “That was the thing I wanted to accomplish most. I think there needed to probably be a little more runway to get it on TV, because by the time we were calling, TV schedules were already set.”

USSSA learned that they had won the bid for the 2018 World Cup in October 2017. Because of that, they had less than a year to coordinate when, where, and how the event could take place. The timeline, Wabick says, also made it difficult for him to get major advertisers to sign on, since they had to move so quickly. Because the host country and organization was decided so late, USSSA only had space for the two-week tournament in their schedule in late August. This timing has not been a problem in other countries where games have been located in cities and local populations value women’s baseball. “If we are fortunate enough to have another opportunity, we’d probably shift the dates.” Wabick says.

Do you think Bryce Harper is worried about whether or not his game will be on TV?

USSSA has a history of putting on good tournaments. The stadium had beautiful facilities. The players raved about getting to go to the Kennedy Space Center and being treated like professionals. But at the same time, no one seemed to know the tournament was happening despite the fact that the professional women’s softball team (the USSSA Pride), which normally plays in that stadium, average around 2,500 fans at each of their 25 home games every year. Only one shirt — a white shirt promoting the tournament with a smudged Canadian flag — was available to purchase. There was no merchandise available for any of the national teams: no hats, no jerseys, no rally towels.

(L-R) Buddy Brown, Owen Clarke, and Pierre Aubin support team Canada from he stands during the super round of the Women’s Baseball World Cup 2018 in Viera, Florida at USSSA Space Coast Stadium on Wednesday, August 29, 2018. (Cassi Alexandra for Longreads)

Team USA lost to Canada, a country where parents and coaches have only recently begun to build a Little League structure for all-girls baseball. After the game, none of the players were brought to the press room for the general press. “I leave it to their discretion,” the WBSC spokesperson said, mentioning that it was a tough loss and that he couldn’t make them do press because they weren’t professional athletes. “It was a very emotional loss,” the spokesperson said. One of the biggest criticisms of female athletes is that they are too emotional to play.

This gave Team USA the appearance of extremely poor losers, despite a more complex reality. Later, a player told me that they were scheduled so tightly they barely had time to do interviews after the game. They had 30 minutes from the minute their game ended to be on the bus back to their hotel — 30 minutes to eat, shower, say hi to loved ones, and maybe do media.

“It’s almost like sabotage,” Ring says when asked about whether the tournament could indeed increase awareness of the sport as everyone hoped. “They were set up for failure.”

I think we had the most talented team,” Coach Alvarez says. “I think our downfall is that we only get one week together before playing and then its game time. I wish that we had more time together.”

Losing a chance to medal, though, felt like more than just a personal loss for many players and fans of women’s baseball. It felt like a missed opportunity for the sport of women’s baseball overall. “The [United States medaling] would have been something that would have helped us get the United States sports people to go, OK. Let’s start girls baseball.’ Instead, of just having a tournament here or there for girls to come and play in,” Sheldon says.

Of the more than 25 people involved at all levels of women’s American baseball I spoke to, all agreed that the best thing that can be done for the sport is the creation of girls baseball leagues. They would love for something like what happened in Japan — a wealthy benefactor creating a small pro league — to happen in the States. But even if that were to happen there has to be a pipeline for women to reach that league. Right now there’s next to nothing.

As it relates to a women’s professional league, we have to ensure that a sustainable infrastructure is in place.” MLB’s Reagins says. In order to make this sort of investment a success, we need to make sure that what is put together will not only survive, but thrive. We don’t believe we are there yet, but who knows what could ultimately happen as women’s baseball gains more momentum.”

There is a village of people fighting for women’s baseball in America: the Rockford Peaches, the players, the parents of players, the fans. Former players are creating teams for girls and tournaments with their own money. “I have been involved as a player at every level, and I have never seen the amount of passion for this game as I did with the people I met in women’s baseball,” Wabick says. “If the right people get in the room, they can bring the right attention.”

I think our downfall is that we only get one week together before playing and then its game time. I wish that we had more time together.

But who are the right people? Currently, there are many proponents of the women’s game, but no real leadership. Francis Ford Coppola, the director of the Godfather series, was at the World Cup. He has consistently financially supported women’s baseball, pushing the Sonoma Stompers, a men’s professional team, to recruit and play women. There are no women on the Stompers roster at the moment, although two members of this year’s Team USA (Kelsie Whitmore and Stacy Piagno) played on the Stompers in the past. Coppola, though, is just one man. USSSA is a governing body, so while they could support girls Little Leagues financially and logistically, the organization doesn’t have the capability create them. USA Baseball could create a 14U — short for ages 14 and under — or a 20U team for women, but without WBSC tournaments (which exist at 23U, 18U, 15U, and 12U for men) there would be no one for them to play. According to WBSC spokesperson Oscar Lopez the “feasibility and rollout [of creating programs for girls are] under review” currently. There is no timeline for that decision to be made.

The vast divide that exists between the resources being given to men’s baseball and those being given to women’s baseball are almost cartoonishly illustrated at the only level where both exist: the World Cup. The 2017 Men’s Baseball World Championship game was played in 2017 in Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles, averaged just over 27,000 attendees per game, and aired on MLB Network in America. Championship hats were immediately handed out to Team USA when they won the gold. On an erected blue stage, the team of men stood behind a shining circular podium that held their trophy.

A year later in Viera, Team Japan hoisted their trophy above their head. A platform less than a foot off the ground had been constructed for them to stand on, and each player warily eyed it as she stepped up, as if worried it might collapse. It is the same platform used for WBSC  tournaments except for the men’s World Championship, which has a real stage, champion hats, and confetti. The announcers mispronounced even the names of the players on the Canadian team for their bronze medal. And the posters on the spray painted podium were starting to peel from the humidity.

Team USA celebrate a home run during the super round of the Women’s Baseball World Cup 2018 against Canada in Viera, Florida at USSSA Space Coast Stadium on Wednesday, August 29, 2018. (Cassi Alexandra for Longreads)

Most of the women on 2018’s Team USA won’t get to play again until the next World Cup in 2020. Underwood, at 37, is still deciding whether or not she’ll keep playing. They will return to their lives and their real jobs. They will dream about playing on the diamond again and wake up disappointed. Each year, thousands of girls will switch over to softball, or quit playing the game entirely because no one has made a path for them to go forward.

“That’s the story of women’s baseball,” Underwood said. “We don’t get to play in the same facilities. We don’t get the same attention. We don’t get the same opportunities.”

***

Kelsey McKinney is a writer living in Washington, D.C.

***

Editor: Ethan Chiel
Photographer: Cassi Alexandra
Fact-checker: Samantha Schuyler
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

The Rising Tide of Wrongful Convictions

Hiob/Getty.

Lara Bazelon | an excerpt adapted from Rectify: The Power of Restorative Justice After Wrongful Conviction | Beacon Press | 24 minutes (6,738 words)

The National Registry of Exonerations is a small, nonprofit research project founded in 2012. What the project lacks in manpower it makes up in zeal, documenting every known exoneration dating back to 1989, the first year that DNA exonerations were recorded in the United States. Staff members collect detailed information about each case from court documents and news reports, provide a comprehensive narrative about the case, and break down the data into numerous categories, including gender, race, geography, crime of conviction, factors that contributed to the wrongful conviction, and whether the case involved DNA. The registry’s website provides detailed graphs that set out the cause or causes of the wrongful convictions and chart their frequency over time.

On March 7, 2017, the registry released a report summarizing the data it had documented since its founding: 1,994 exonerations. (The number is now above 2,100.) Seventy-eight percent of the exonerations did not involve DNA evidence. This finding surprises many people, as it seems at odds with the way that crime is prosecuted on popular television shows and in movies, where the perpetrator inevitably leaves behind a tiny but undeniable bit of himself. Skin follicles are collected from under the victim’s fingernails, blood or semen is retrieved from a stain, a trace of saliva is lifted from a soda can or cigarette butt. In fictionalized accounts, diligent detectives and technicians rapidly collect and analyze this trace DNA evidence. More often than not, when the episode concludes, the bad guy has been conclusively identified, apprehended, and locked away.

The reality is much messier and more complicated. Even when DNA exists, backlogs and bureaucracy mean that it can take months, if not years, to test. Crime labs also come to erroneous conclusions, often because the technicians are incompetent, overwhelmed, or even corrupt. In 2010, at a San Francisco crime laboratory, a technician stole some of the cocaine she was supposed to be testing, resulting in a scandal that led to the dismissal of seventeen hundred pending criminal cases. Five years later, in the same laboratory, two other bad apples — a technician and her immediate supervisor — were discovered to have committed misconduct so serious it required the San Francisco district attorney’s office to review fourteen hundred criminal cases. Both employees had failed DNA proficiency testing examinations administered by a national crime lab accrediting agency a year earlier, but had kept their jobs. At least one found conclusive DNA matches where none existed. Read more…

The Organ Transplant Story You Don’t Hear

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Katya Cengel | Longreads | November 2018 | 14 minutes (3,847 words)

 

His arms are covered with the sticky gunk left after bandages come off. There is a blue bruise on the inside of his right forearm. A long plastic tube enters a hole near his belly button. When it’s not in use, James “Bo” Calvert tucks the tube that he uses for dialysis into a spandex “bra” that circles his chest.

Calvert has stage 4 kidney disease, which means his kidney function is only 15 to 30 percent. There are six stages of chronic kidney disease — stage 4 is the last stage before end-stage renal disease (ESRD), when the kidneys cannot filter waste and excess fluid from the blood. At this point, you need a transplant or dialysis to stay alive.

Calvert has had both.

Read more…

Double, Double, Toil and Trouble: A Reading List About Witches

The Witches Sabbath, by Frans Francken II, 1607.

Sara Benincasa is a quadruple threat: she writes, she acts, she’s funny, and she has truly exceptional hair. She also reads, a lot, and joins us to share some of her favorite stories (and some of her friends’ favorites, too). 

What is a witch, anyway? Is it an old woman with green skin stirring a pot of something weird and stinky in an animated fairy tale? Is it a man who lives in the wilderness in isolation and emerges only to perform specific rituals to bring the rains? Is it a hippie chick in Berkeley in flowing fabrics appropriating cultural totems and symbols in order to get a desperate wealthy tech couple fertile and baby-ready? Based on my research, the answers seem to be “sure,” “yes,” and “I mean, I guess so.”

Read more…