I’m standing in an art studio/football big-screen TV room built as an add-on to my college roommate’s sister’s ranch-style home.

I am holding a World Series trophy over my head.

My roommate takes a photo of me with the trophy and I hand it to a third roommate — he could care less about baseball but he takes the thing anyway.

The three of us walk out toward the pool with my roommate’s brother-in-law, who won said trophy as a member of a championship team from the 1980s. No, this is not a trivia question.

The four of us sit down in chairs next to the pool. Nobody says anything for a while, but I’m hoping the guy will say something about baseball. After a long silence a big grin crosses the face of my roommate. He’d remembered something. Something that would come at my expense. It should be mentioned here that he and I have not remained friends over the years.

It’s hot and I’m wondering why my roommate is smiling. He turns to his brother-in-law and says:

“Tell him about Johnny Bench.”

“What about him?” says the ex-player.

My roommate turns to me, still smiling. The third roommate has stood up and is inspecting something in the grass. A strong, warm wind picks up and blows my half-empty beer can onto its side.

“Johnny Bench is gay,” my roommate tells me gleefully.

I tell my roommate to shut up, but in realizing that we aren’t in our three bedroom house in Davis, California, but at an ex-ballplayer’s ranch-style home in the wine country, I realize my roommate isn’t just messing around. That in fact, there is someone sitting with us who likely has much more insight than I do.

The ex-ballplayer stares at nothing in particular, takes a sip of his beer and says:

“Gayer than Zorro.”

I sit there and say nothing. I don’t really have a problem with this. I grew up in the Bay Area, saw my first transgender sweeping the sidewalk on Haight Street when I was 13, and worked with a lesbian couple at a liquor store as my after school job during high school.

However, Bench was my childhood idol. Naturally, he’d been retired for several years, and the “Baseball Bunch,” the reason I chose Bench as my favorite player, had long seized to exist. Needless to say, his being homosexual never crossed my mind.

I sat there, not really knowing what to say. The ex-ballplayer sipped at his beer. My roommate seemed a little disappointed I wasn’t giving him more of a reaction. The other roommate walked down into a small apple orchard further back on the property.

After a few minutes of silence the ex-ballplayer got up and walked toward the house. “Time to eat,” he said over his shoulder. We followed him in.

That night the three of us slept on the floor in the studio. When I opened my eyes the next morning I remember staring at the trophy across the room. Sitting there on the dusty shelf. There was nothing else on the shelf, but the trophy was hardly displayed prominently. It was just there like anything else.

For some reason the image of Johnny Bench sitting on an airplane came into my head.

The ex-ballplayer’s wife was a stewardess. That was how they’d met.