August and everything after

By Jon Weisman

Twenty years ago, this was shaping up to be a good week.

As spring sneaked up on summer in 1994, the Dodgers were in first place. They surged to the top with a seven-game winning streak in mid-May and never fell off the perch, taking the division lead into August. My niece – my brother’s first child and my parents’ first grandchild – was born on August 8.

I was an uncle, the Dodgers were on top, and bigger than any of it, I was in love.

Life wasn’t perfect. The girl I was in love with was in Washington D.C., where I had left her the previous summer, when I finished graduate school and moved back home to Los Angeles to pursue my screenwriting career. (The first CD I bought back in my hometown, with no premonition, was this.)

And the Dodgers weren’t quite running away with the National League West. On August 1, here was the extent of their dominance.

More foreboding was the threat of baseball coming to a halt. This was nothing new, and in fact, the bad memories from the 50-day strike in 1981 were overwritten by the Dodgers’ dramatic match to their first World Series title in my lifetime. My girlfriend was coming to town on August 12, and while she was here, I would take her to Dodger Stadium for the first time. What these expectations might have lacked in extravagance, they offered in sweetness.

The clock ticked down. August 11 was a day game – an excessively early weekday morning getaway game, the Dodgers in Cincinnati. I listened quietly on the radio in my office on the Disney lot in Burbank, where I worked as a casting administration assistant, trying to soak up experience and make connections. Ross Porter clocked the final pitches of Ramon Martinez, tidily shutting out the Reds. The game ended, with no promise of tomorrow.

The Dodgers flew home. My girlfriend landed in Los Angeles the next day, and I went to LAX to pick her up. Our tickets for the August 12, 1994 game at Dodger Stadium were left by the wayside. No game that night. No game that weekend, no game that homestand. Four days later, having otherwise occupied our time, she returned to Glover Park.

The next few days are a blank. What I can say is that every day, she and I talked, and every day, baseball’s owners and players didn’t – or, didn’t with any meaningfulness. Then, not to belabor this story, on Friday the 19th, she and I didn’t talk, which was strange, and on Saturday the 20th, she told me she had met someone else.

The summer of 1994 offered a pretty major lesson in the perils of denial. There were warning signs on all fronts that I blithely ignored, that I wanted so little part of that they barely registered. And now there was no baseball, and no girl, and just a job that suddenly seemed downright feeble, crumbs of a new career whose future I no longer felt any reason to believe in.

I spent longer than I care to admit punishing myself for my failings, ridiculing my blind stupidity, sinking into depression, something that I might not have even mentioned tonight if not for the tragic Robin Williams news that reminds me that far worse than shame is silence. I thought the message of the summer of ’94 was to beware of arrogance disguised as confidence. Instead, I traded one kind of denial for another. Life was really good and I was a good person – sorry, life was really bad and I was a terrible person.

This period, as it was happening, was endless. I counted the days as they passed, in numbers that moved into the hundreds. I watched life move on for everyone. Soon my ex-girlfriend had moved in with her new boyfriend, and the sole consolation was that she hadn’t dumped me for something trifling, but in fact for the one she would marry. Even baseball, which had hardly been lower since the segregation era, rallied, getting back in business before the next April was over.

It was good to have baseball back. And those Dodgers, they were back in first place, and they were pretty fun: Mike Piazza, Raul Mondesi, Little Chad Fonville. And Hideo Nomo. I rode my bike to the beach with my radio, the very day Nomonia began – oddly, another midweek day game, this one against the Giants. And I stayed there, lying on the sand by myself, until the end.

LA 000 000 000 000 003–3
SF 000 000 000 000 004–4

A tremendous victory. And a shrug. (Update: I remembered the game wrong — the Dodgers actually lost, which helps explain the shrug.) I still wasn’t right. And as much as I knew I wasn’t right, I didn’t feel there was anything to be done about it until I actually scored a job in TV, and then another job, and it didn’t seem to make a difference to my psyche at all. It was time to stop going it alone.

Eventually, things would get better. And what’s amazing is how interminable a period can become so much shorter in the rear-view mirror (though certainly, I would have thought the Dodgers would have been back in the World Series by now). My main desire in writing this piece was to punctuate the fact that 20 years had passed since the events began, and that while I’m not exactly invulnerable, I’ve had decent perspective on it all for 80 or 90 percent of that time. Nothing’s guaranteed in my life, except more happiness and sadness, sadness and happiness.

Twenty years. We celebrated my niece’s birthday Friday, with my own three kids in tow, with my team back in first place, with no strike on the horizon and with my true best girl meeting us at home. This story doesn’t have an end. It just has more to come.