The Bullpen Gospels by Dirk Hayhurst Page B

me, but I didn’t buy it. Turns out, I was wrong. Now one of my nads has a seam mark on it. It was the worst pain I’d ever felt in my life, ripping through my body like a chainsaw, not letting up for twenty-four hours.
    “Did you lose one?” Frenchy asked.
    “No, but I was dangerously close. I remember praying I would never think another impure thought if God would just let me keep them!”
    “So does everything work down there?”
    “I think so. I haven’t tried to have kids yet, but everything seems to function like it’s supposed to.”
    “Well, you should be ashamed of yourself, if you ask me,” Brent said.
    “Why is that?”
    “Promising God no more impure thoughts and then looking up sheep porn on the lobby computer, it’s just wrong.”
    “Alright,” Earp said, resuming his lecture. He had folded up his notes and was about to end the meeting but was looking to go out on a bang. “Anyone got any good jokes?” He looked over the crowd, but no one felt courageous. “Lars, I know you got something.”
    Lars Maynard, a right-handed closer drafted the same year as I was, may best be introduced as the one person in the organization who could walk up to Grady and tell him to go fuck himself without batting an eye. He was, without a doubt, the most interesting person I ever played the game with, and thanks to his eccentric personality, he stood out among peers and coaches. Sometimes it almost seemed as if he were from another world.
    To give you an idea of what kind of guy Lars was, you need to know what Tommy John surgery is, which Lars underwent a little over a year before. Named after the pitcher who the surgery was tested on, Tommy John is the reconstruction of the ulnar collateral ligament, or UCL, located in a pitcher’s throwing arm. It’s major surgery requiring holes to be drilled in bones and the harvesting of a replacement ligament sewn through said holes. The goal is to repair the damaged throwing arm and save the career of the pitcher who receives it.
    Normal recovery time for the operation is about a year. It takes months to get the necessary range of motion back in your elbow, fighting through layers of scar tissue. But that was just too long for Lars.
    After surgery, Lars walked into the doctor’s office for a consultation and he asked the doctor how long it would take to get full mobility back in his arm. The doctor told him the usual, months of rehab. Lars asked why, a question most people would hold off on, content to take the doctor’s word, considering their arm just had holes drilled in it. But Lars had done a lot of homework on the surgery before he went under the knife—a lot. In fact, it wasn’t uncommon to catch Lars reading books on pharmacology or medical journals in the locker room.
    The doctor explained the process of recovery—how breaking up all the scar tissue is excruciating and how the body has to go about it slowly to build up its tolerance. Lars looked the doctor in the face and bluntly asked, “Pain is the only thing? There are no other repercussions?”
    “The kind of pain I’m talking about is enough of a repercussion.”
    “So, I could get it back now if I could take the pain?”
    The doctor laughed. “Sure, but you don’t want to do that.”
    Lars stood up right then and there, pulled off his sling, placed his arm in the frame of the office door, and jerked his arm straight. He swooned and passed out. When he came to, despite the chastisement of his doctor, he could extend his arm straight.
    Of course, this story didn’t shock me that much. Before he had Tommy John, he chose to have open-back surgery with no anesthetic. He said that, at the time, he believed experiencing the farthest reaches of pain would serve to expand his ability to appreciate life more fully. It was part of his metaphysical period, in which he also got high and traced his out-of-body experiences in spiral patterns, hoping to capture thoughts created by brain activity usually