Midnight, El Magic, or wherever you might be in this wondrous world, bet that Phil Capers will pull out The Tape from the inner-pocket of his favorite vest, which is the color of a bull shark's sad, sad face, as he likes to say, not the tape, or the grainy images The Tape plays, but the vest, Phil's vest. Those that spend a lot of time in El Magic know The Tape has a little bit of everything, mostly stuff from Phil's life before my mother and I entered it, clips of his growing daughter, ballerina recitals, pet burials, pre-prom festivities, gun range practices, jazz. Last night, though, Winona, an El Magic habitué who drapes herself on everyone except me because I'm 15, Winona said nothing's going to stop her from watching the Mets.

"Mookie steals a homer in this one," she said.

"When does he not?" Phil said.

El Magic's owner pays me under-the-counter for cleaning dishes and sweeping up peanut casings, not vomit, though, as some might construe this as child exploitation. El Magic is a converted trailer, about a quarter of its shell ripped off and all of its insides pulled out to fit the tables and stools and wrap-around bar with all of its blinking lights, the coconut faces hanging from the ceiling, the bug zappers glowing violet. We all sit at the bar and mirror-gaze at one another more than we watch the television that sits amidst rows of amber bottles. When everyone is gone and Phil and I are about to walk back home, which just about 100 paces down the dirt road leading to El Magic, I file the Mets tapes according to their dates. It's important to all of us at El Magic that I keep their storage sequential. Sometimes, I feel as though I'm a gatekeeper to a boozy midnight portal that allows all who enter El Magic to enter Shea Stadium, 1986.

Today's Phil's birthday. He drives us to his favorite place to eat, not El Magic, but Quiznos. Afterwards, he walks into the flower shop next door, buys the biggest bouquet of tiger lilies they sell. The florist has arranged with these tiny colorful flowers, Met orange.

We walk out smelling like a bunch of flowers and I ask, "Those aren't for me, are they?"

"No."

We drive out to a neighborhood. Phil, he's like Kris Kristofferson without the guitar and singing talent. He wears jeans so tight, I can't help but picturing his junk as Hans Solo carbon frozen in Jabba's lair and then I remember that my mother was once intimate with Phil and that he's still the closest thing I have to family. We stop at a pink house with a chain-link fence and a Doberman who mewls at Phil like he's Doolittle. A woman answers the door. She's about Phil's age and has blond hair just about down to her hips and it's wet like she's just come out of the shower, but there's the smell of cut grass and a mower sits near the porch's corner, its handlebar just visible above the railing. She eyes the lilies.

"Phil, I don't want none of what you're selling today."

"I just wanted you to meet my son and maybe go out and get something to eat with us."

"We just ate," I say.

They both look at me, Phil and this sweaty woman.

On the way back home, Phil tells me he doesn't know whether he can do this for another year and I ask what it is that he can't do and he tells me that he doesn't know. Then he says, with a wide sweep of his arm, "This, everything, you, El Magic."

But we go again, of course, that night. Phil walks in still carrying the lilies woven with Met-orange flowers, though they're all a little wilted now, and he lays the bouquet down right on the bar in front of me. The VCR player swallows The Tape and a montage begins, Phil's teen daughter dancing to various 45's. The scenes always switch mid-chorus and I wonder if Phil edited them this way to make watching The Tape even more frustrating. Winona sneaks me a shot and drapes herself over my shoulder like it's my birthday, too.

"Have I introduced you to my son?" Phil asks, pointing a thumb at me.

Winona extends one finger and jabs it toward Phil and me. She says, "A good game of darts can flush whatever venom you got for one another."

Twenty minutes later, we've reached that part of The Tape where Phil's daughter, a girl with pigtails now, is performing sign language to a zoo gorilla who stares at her through the thick pane of Plexiglas. Her fingers seem to undergo random convulsions more than form intelligible signs, but behind the camera, a younger version of Phil says, "Keep doing it, sweetheart, he's just stunned by your articulateness." And even now, Phil says, "That gorilla did get it. I could even tell back then."

I challenge Phil to darts and he's up from his stool before I am. Winona hands me the cup of darts and when I reach the board, Phil is there squatting so the back of his head is aligned with the bull's-eye.

"Let's make this interesting," he says.

Phil stands straight, closes his eyes, and waits. I pick out three darts, the sharpest I can find. The first ricochets from the wall and the second lands near his feet. "Come on, soft boy," he says and I aim straight for that secret pocket where he usually keeps The Tape. And just as the dart is about to leave my hand, the crowd at Shea cheers—Winona having changed The Tape—and the people of El Magic scream what they always scream.

"Catch it, Mookie. Catch. It."

For a moment, we forget about darts and we watch Mookie, too. And Mookie does. Of course, he does. He always does.