Long Time (Intro)

Randy Rodriguez will be a baseball star. Even in the darkness I can see the contours of his perfect abs, the fleshy foretokens of his future glory. Head thrown back, throat supple, wet eyes looking up at the Los Angeles night sky. I watch him from behind a chink in his backyard fence. It’s not that weird. It’s not like I don’t know Randy personally. We’re friends. Usually, I’m on the other side of the fence, with the other guys, sometimes the girls, if they can come. Randy’s dad knows my name. We talk. I know how it feels when he asks if we kids like Modelos as much as we like his Maserati, and I know what happens after that. I’ve tracked my wet feet through the Brentwood house to the beer fridge in the basement with four or five guys about four or five times. The Brentwood house—all white, like those Greek ones in yogurt commercials—is plastered inside with glossy press pics of Randy. Him at the plate, him in a slide, him in the air, glove up, mouth agape. Anyhow, I mean to imply that I’m not a stranger. I’ve slept on the plush leather sofas in the basement. I’ve snuck my share of snacks and sodas from the Tuscan kitchen. I’ve even stolen Henny from the whiskey den with Randy by my side. I go into all this stuff simply to clarify that I’m not a freak obsessive type. I’m not psychotic. This is my tax bracket. My mom drives a true Porsche. In the eighth grade, I made it to first base with a girl in a backyard that’s not even out of earshot of this backyard. All I do is look harder than most people do. I do not see patterns that are not there.

Randy’s not alone in the backyard. Mr. Rodriguez is out there with his son. He watches him, too. He’s an orthodontist for celebrities and only does veneers. He wears a Dodgers jersey so long you can hardly see his shorts and a big gold chain. Randy has a few friends over. I’ve met them. Handsome young guys with veneers. For these guys, this is the place to be. Randy is like a vortex. They want to be sucked up by his powers, to get the girls and the scouts and the fancy gifts from college teams, the steaks and the cologne samples and the free baseball gear. They want to live in the nook between his front delts and his upper traps. Most of them are on their phones, but one or two are in the pool, well lit, idly wading. It’s after midnight now and it’s a school night, so if there were girls here, they probably had to go home. I think there were, because all the guys drying off still have perfect perms. Mr. Rodriguez has his biggest chain on—sometimes the girls bring their moms—and Randy has a wistful look in his eye. If you weren’t friendly with Randy and you saw him like that, lounged out, shirtless, massaging his own thigh while looking wistfully at the stars, you might think he was thinking about baseball. The money, the fame. That would be wrong, though. Randy’s not thinking about ball.

Die Lit is playing on a loop, but I don’t think anybody notices. The guys are all kind of checked out, and I can tell by the way they’re dapping up each other that a couple of them have Ubers on the way. But nobody’s dapping up Randy—nobody in the backyard even seems to notice Randy, who’s sitting just a few feet away from his deckchair—nor does anybody seem to see that Randy is crying. I’m wearing all black, I’m peering through this chink in the fence, and I don’t even really notice it, but I’m saying I ain’t felt like this in a long time, I ain’t had shit in a long time.

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Jacob Sponga lives in Montreal, Quebec. He is Editor-in-Chief of Scrivener Creative Review.