a skyline chili love story

June 7, 2024 by Steve Myers 10 Comments

Yellow school buses with the plastic green seat cushions were like restaurant booths. You could turn around and sit on your knees and invade the privacy of the person or persons sitting behind you. There were no seatbelts and the ride was bumpety bump, no place to pick your nose or put on lipstick, not that anyone wore any, but there were two girls on the team, Brenda Frenick and Jenny Wasowski, on the suburban Milwaukee high school varsity squad and some players were juniors, others seniors and two kids only in their sophomore years were awarded a varsity letter much to the chagrin of older kids who didn’t make the team.

Jenny was ok, a decent singles hitter with an ok eye, worked counts and walked and what not and on defense got down on one knee in left field to block the ball, but personal accolades aside, what she loved most about playing on those teams was the back of the bus shenanigans, talking and goofing off on the way to the games and on the way home whether they won or lost, it didn’t matter. It was just being together, having a good time. The third baseman’s nickname was Pie, last name Risinger and they never knew where the nickname came from but it stuck. Then there was the second Baseman Timmy Frendenberg. He loved to talk about his fantasy baseball team and studied the sports page stats that he brought with him in his gym bag. The centerfielder loved Farah Fawcett and it was kind of creepy because it wasn’t so much about her looks and more about her personality which was weird because he had never met the former actress and plus she was dead.

Nestor Cameron was on their team too, the same Cameron who went on to play in university and eventually manage a high school team. He was pretty serious. He sat in the front of the bus. No one really admired his discipline, but as the years went by just about everyone looked back and wished they had some, especially Jenny Wasowski because she could never keep a job and turned to drinking, heavy drinking, in the early morning hours, topping off her coffees and sips all through the day and night, but she never attended AA meetings because to her those were for 12 step preachers. She preferred the title of drunk as in happy, liked to sing and dance and buy drinks for people at bar time and though she never stayed at the same job for more than two years consecutively, she always held down some job, from construction worker lackey to delivering publi-sac advertisements and so she always had enough money to drink and maybe more importantly buy drinks for others.

Jenny had Kashubian ancestors who lived in what is now Jones Island in Milwaukee.

“My ancestors were fish people” she told everyone on that high school baseball bus and then she’d make up songs about different kinds of fish and people loved her, always did. Jenny never dreamed of making it to the major leagues, just in search of the next kick and so when it came around to the end of the season August awards dinner, she didn’t receive any trophy regarding her knack for bunting for base hits or stealing the occasional base, but she did get praised for being the team’s lone representative at the 1988 all-star game in Cincinnati. There were no votes needed because she really did go to the game. 

The roots of this story originate in 1980 when Jenny’s dad who had a horrible drinking problem making one wonder if the habit was hereditary, passed on to Jenny or just a consequence of being around, the environmental factor, a sort of osmosis. Anyway, dad was in the hospital for neck issues, most likely from bad posture while sitting and sipping at the rail. It was January, the new year and Brewer fans were celebrating the recent arrival of Pete Vukovich, Rollie Fingers, and Ted Simmons to their team. Jenny was just 10 years, but she had a hunch that the implications this trade might have on Brewers history. She acquired her love for baseball at an early age, thanks to her father who bought her baseball cards beginning in 1976. Jenny especially loved the “traded cards” with the newspaper like clipping announcement at the bottom. As she sat in the hospital waiting room and her father sobered up in the neck traction room she noticed a stand alone magazine rack and who wouldn’t with it swirling around and squeaky noises and during one of those spin arounds she spotted a small magazine and what looked like a pitcher so she walked over to the rack and plucked the rose and it was a Baseball digest and she looked closer and it was Mike Flanagon. She didn’t open it up and read the words, the article, not yet anyway. She just focused on the image because she knew Flanagon from the 1979 World Series and years later she knew him as a tragedy, as someone who blew their brains out with a shotgun, a horrific way to commit suicide where as sleeping pills washed down with Vodka  seemed almost relaxing. Flanagon won 167 games and had a career ERA of 3.90, another reminder that stats aren’t everything. Anyway, Jenny portaged that baseball digest to her dad’s room. He was completely horizontal, his head facing the floor, exactly like Johnny in the movie THE OUTSIDERS. It was a depressing site, but Jenny extended her hand, the one with the baseball digest so her dad could see the cover and he never flinched. It was like he was waiting for her to ask.

“We’ll get a subscription.”

And as his father and grandfather used to say, “so it goes” and so baseball digest arrived once per month to their suburban mailbox and it was better than any sunset or sunrise and one month a few years later, in the wonderful back ads of baseball digest, there was a contest, send a self addressed envelope and win tickets to the 1988 all star game and well, “shit, god damn” as Jenny’s boyfriend at the time, Jeff Brunklet used to say and still says….Jenny wanted to go because maybe Teddy Higuera of the Brewer would be selected and pitch and that would be a sight to see. Jenny dreamed of one day speaking Spanish and travelling to Spain and Mexico and South and Central America and see how other people lived and then she found out about baseball being so popular in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic and she wanted to travel there even more. Anyway, a letter arrived a few weeks later announcing that she had won or thought she had…..turns out she had just won the right to “buy” tickets, but they were 35 bucks each and since her boyfriend Jeff didn’t really care about baseball or have 70 bucks, she asked her dad to go and he said ok, but he wasn’t gonna drive because he knew a few bars in Cincinnati and he wanted to sit and drink with locals so they took the greyhound to the game in Cincinnati on July 12, 1988 which happened to be her father’s 46th birthday which neither he nor she chalked up as destiny because they didn’t believe in that sort of thing. To them, life was about displaced people, everyone on the move and the only saint that mattered was Saint Anthony, patron saint of shipwrecks and we were all shipwrecked, never really knowing where we would wind up.

It was like an 8 hour drive from Milwaukee to Cincinnati and the two talked about baseball pretty much the entire trip or dad did while sipping from a flask, teaching his daughter about it being believed that the Reds were the oldest baseball team and Johnny Vandeer Meer tossing back to back no-hitters and Joe Nuxhall becoming the youngest to ever play in a major league game, 15 years and 300 some days young. Dad mused about Joe Morgan’s back arm twitch and on and on about the Reds and Cincinnati. They stayed at the Gateway Lodge Motel and dad seemed pretty proud when he handed over a couple of twenty dollar bills and there was a maid named Wanda – super friendly. She told them about her brother’s beer can collection and how much she loved the Reds and Marge Schott and her dog and how she impersonated Pete Rose when working,

“I’m what we call an overachiever who does the tasks no one else wants to do like cleaning toilets or removing leaves from the rooftop gutters.”

Dad slipped out of the motel that night and took a bus to Milton’s Prospect Tavern and did what he had to do – drink beer and meet locals and he passed out on the way home, on a school yard lawn so he never made it home in time the next day to get to the game which was nothing new to Jenny so she asked Wanda to go.

The American League won 2-1 and Frank Viola got the win, but what really stuck out was the batting practice homerun Jose Canseco hit, into the upper deck where Wanda and Jenny were sitting. Musta traveled more than 500 feet.

“Makes you wonder, you know,” said Jenny, “about limits and infinity.”

“You can be whatever you want to be,” replied Wanda.

They walked slowly back to the motel after the game, Wanda discussing her father who had passed away earlier that year and Jenny thought, regardless of her father being a drunk, she loved him, loved him very much.

Jenny found her dad in the motel room sleeping and when he finally woke up, he said,

“Boy do I have a surprise for you. Last night I learned about a local treat.”

They walked a few miles and eventually reached a Skyline Chili local fast food type of joint. The Chili was good, really good, lots of cheese, spicy and as they ate dad talked about other cities and histories of baseball teams and wondered if Greyhound offered a pass to travel around for a few months.

“Hell yeh, we could see every stadium!” he beamed to his daughter, “roam around cities, find its eateries and bars. And if our journey stretches into September and October, I’ll homeschool you! My dad did that with me one year while driving over-the-road trucks. Did I ever tell you about that?”