Ronnie Salazar was pitching the next evening in San Francisco, so I caught an afternoon flight from LAX.
Like Jennifer Jones, the stewardesses weren't getting any younger, but they were mostly still nicely put together, at least from the perspective of a man of a certain age.
I'm old enough to remember when stewardesses were the sex goddesses of the sky. My old man went on a spree of dating and boning them after he divorced my mom and moved into a condo complex in Dallas not far from Love Field. The place was stacked with stewardesses. And the stewardesses were stacked, too. The pool was filled with them. When I went for a swim, it was hard to keep from staring. And hard to keep from getting hard. I would get an eyeful and then retreat to my dad's condo and wank off to the stacks of Playboys in his closet when he was at work. Evenings and weekends I would listen to him balling one young thing after another.
My tastes have matured, some, as I've gotten older. But in comparison to Jen riding me in my office the day before, there wasn't all that much worth spending time perusing inside the airplane, so I gazed out the window as we took off over the beach, gained altitude over the sets coming in off the Pacific, and then banked north over Malibu.
Jen Jones was probably at home down there on the beach right now. Up no good, no doubt. The thought of it started to get an involuntary rise out of me.
I reviewed what she had told me the day before. Ronnie Salazar, she suspected, was cheating on her daughter, Betsy, when the Dodgers were out of town. He wasn't playing safe. Betsy was seven months pregnant and at her wit's end. Before confronting Ronnie, they needed information.
I didn't know anything about the state of Ronnie's play off the field. I was just a fair-weather fan, but I had sources, friends who could recount the whole roster's stats and the play-by-play of yesterday's game as well as games played years ago. Ronnie wasn't a guy about whom rumors flew. Low profile, low ERA, just like management liked. No chicks had come home to roost around him, as far as I knew.
That night in San Francisco, I sat in the upper right field stands, had a gourmet Italian sausage and a Sierra Nevada, and watched the sun go down and the lights come up all around the bay. Down below on the mound, in that red dirt diamond encased in emerald green, Ronnie carefully painted the corners and got the Giants to hit the pitches he wanted them to hit through six and two-thirds scoreless innings. When he walked off the mound, the fans chanted "Beat LA," but the Giants weren't coming back that night.
I left the stadium and walked to the player's hotel. I sat at the bar as the Dodger's closer, a big man, a Giant killer, blew nine fastballs in a row past the Giant's final three batters. I was on my third martini when I saw Ronnie sauntering across the lobby. I slapped two Jacksons on the bar and hustled down to the porte cochère where my rental car, an anonymous looking blue Prius, was waiting at the valet.
Ronnie got into a black Uber. I followed.
I always loved San Francisco, day and night. I had some of my own awakenings in the city as a college student and dropout. I left part of my heart there, and some bodily fluids.
Nowadays daytime San Francisco seemed more and more like a fake city, a cute Disney set of a beautiful city, filled with well-groomed actors and actresses playing at being techies changing the world. But at night some of the phony shine vanished and a bit of the old tawdriness crept back in, especially South of Market, where we seemed to be headed.
The Uber dropped Ronnie off near an alley on Harrison between Fifth and Sixth. As it pulled away, he walked a half block south and ducked into a dark doorway. I parked down the street and followed him.
Inside the doorway, down a short flight of metal stairs, another door opened into the foyer of a bathhouse. It smelled like a steamy locker room. A cute young guy with a goatee and a nose ring welcomed me with a smile and in exchange for another Jackson gave me a towel, a small bottle of lube, and a locker key and went back to the novel he was reading, "City of Night." I didn't know people still read John Rechy.
Though I had lost my virginity twice in San Francisco, once to an older woman and then to a younger man, I had never been to a bathhouse. Right at the moment I was ready to plunge into that world, I got scared by AIDS. Who knows what might have come of me if had been born a few years earlier, if that epidemic had not come right when I was exploring my own sexuality, as we used to say, a little willy-nilly as it happened.
I was crazy about women. Still am. Can't get enough of tits and ass, pussy, hairy or shaved, legs and armpits the same, the female form in general. And specifically. Yes, specifically.
