There was spinning around on the playground wheel and then more around and around spinning and we were kids and I guess it was exciting because I was drawn to the wheel and it didn’t stop spinning until we no longer knew where we were, some sort of disorder rebellion against the order our parents imposed on us? the chores listed on the refrigerator? weekend boy scouts or baseball? but at some point, all the flags and varsity jackets and pom pom rah rah rah hooray our team, our country pride lost its luster and so we opted for the disorder and chaos of beer and weed and shooting pool break the balls at 35th and Villard while everyone else, god bless them all, the Fisher shortstop and Cherkauer debate team hero went off to university and the Shultz family built a construction crew empire and so the rest of us focused on nothing and thanks to the joyful drunk poet at the local Kremlet’s bowling ally bar….well, he seemed to know that we were all magic and the lucky ones amongst us believed him.
I knew the beautiful drunk poet as Damon, but none of us knew where he came from, just that there was once living in a county, a small one in Ireland or maybe Poland with no post office box number and he never mentioned the words Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but we knew he knew all our sufferings and all the details with one look at our naked hands in search of a place to hide. He was like some sort of older brother shaman before we ever knew what a shaman was and I haven’t talked to my friends from way back then in a long time but I suspect I’m still searching for a shaman and I know more than ever that I don’t need to travel to the Amazon forest to find one. There’s one right here, right now, just around the corner, in the local tavern, if I would just walk into that strange jukebox land and know once again that we are all human in pursuit of joy and thank god for Irish Y’vonne and her passion for collecting kisses and I’m instantly reminded of the Bob “Hurricane” Hazle my dad taught me like a ghost story, of 1957 and his August September streak of greatness and the Milwaukee Braves winning the National a League and then the World Series….
…..and now as I walk to the local survival store where all of us desperados stand in line for cigarettes, booze, porno magazines, lottery tickets, candy bars, and newspapers, there are pigeons in the window and I wonder if they remember beyond their poking through frat boy vomit for protein… i wonder if they remember their ancestors, those passenger pigeons who brought us news and tomorrow another World Series parade, a tomorrow fever that never ends.
Holy Crap did they have a lot of money, so much that the kids had their own arcade in the basement – electric dartboard and classic Space Invaders, Asteroids, and Donkey Kong machines… Pinball, Air Hockey, a Ping Pong table. There were more rooms in that house than a bird has feathers. And to think how they started, a one room studio in the Good View Houses Welfare Complex, but the man and woman, the husband and wife were determined to twist destiny to their favor since they both came from some strange sounding poor ghetto and so they worked days and studied nights and eventually landed new, higher paying jobs, the husband in the Rail Yard as a Switchman Engineer and the wife did double duty as an Actuary and Dental Hygienest. It took 9 years, but they made it to that big house and they knew that people sleeping in the bush, loitering at libraries learning, eating at soup kitchens also made it.
There were five of them – three kids, two parents and when they moved, Sammy, the youngest had dibs on picking a bedroom and one of these rooms was at the end of the third floor hallway, far away from the parent’s room and yet, Sammy the youngest chose to be near mom and dad and there was no dilly-dally indecision in him. He didn’t need any time to choose because he suffered from awful nightmares and he never remembered any of the details, just that he screamed loudly and didn’t snap out of it until his dad shook him back to consciousness and so he wanted….he needed to be as close as possible to his parents. It was raw survival as real as any ancient shadow on a cave wall.
But as time wore on and the fears and nightmares waned and life took on more practical shape – getting good grades and a girlfriend, that room far from his parent’s room became attractive, a catalyst to thrills because it featured an outdoor porch, not exactly easy to slide down to the ground, but possible and if pulled off, Sammy could have slipped away at night, stayed out way past curfew and done whatever the hell he or his friends wanted to do – climb atop cars and kick in sunroofs, dip into the dumpster behind the Quicky Mart and feast on expired candy or sneak bottles of booze from daddy’s liquor cabinet and drink all night long looking for answers at the bottoms of bottles and more often than not finding them in song and dance.
Sammy tried to bribe his older brother to hand over the room with the porch, but he wouldn’t budge. Still, that room across from Mom and Dad had four walls in which to decorate and so up went a poster of Joe Charboneau and a Wheaties send away poster of Pete Rose which was more of a painting with Riverfront Stadium and a view of a bridge and river and as Sammy creeped through his teenage years, the Rose poster took on more meaning as he started to wander around and discover his town’s four rivers and bridges and railroad tracks. He also had box after box of baseball cards and a signed black and white mug shot photo of U.L Washington and his toothpick and another photo of Jason Thompson scooping a ball at first base and on and on his baseball Hall of Fame museum grew like anyone else’s, young or old. Sammy had his anchor of worldly items that grounded him, had him wanting to live another day.
Sammy didn’t know about Zoroastrianism as a kid, that exciting battle between good and evil forces that the Bible continued to propagate and then cartoons and superheroes but in retrospect, his life did involve two forces, one east, the other west and the two opposites fighting, but also pining to be together, one influencing the other and vice versa. It’s with this in mind that Sammy sat on a green public park bench and thought about a friend who didn’t make it past 40. He took his life for a variety of reasons with the ultimate reason unknown because there was no transcript of his last words. Sammy’s friend was born Gilly Treble and he wrote an ongoing serial satire of Ernie and Bert from Sesame Street, Ernie the eccentric, wild, unorganized, free one and Bert the far more uptight and organized, straight as an arrow opposite. Of course, we aren’t all one side Ernie or other side Bert. We are a mixture of both and thank God Gilly existed in Sammy’s life because he unintentionally (as it usually is) helped bring buried aspects of Sammy’s personality to life, that other half and Sammy did the same for Gilly and it’s with this in mind that Sammy imagined the fictional life of Johnny Atlas.
There were no numbers or graphs or charts on his scouting report, just a quote – “pent up anger” and the appraisers were not exactly trained like those from the PBS Antiques Road Show but they knew that Johnny Atlas possessed very few skills, just this “pent up anger” which might make him useful in bench clearing brawls, but was it worth keeping him on the roster for fighting? Well, it wasn’t much different for utility infielder Lloyd Small, not for anger, but rather his docile nature. He refused to even step on a spider and he lived up to his Small name at 5 feet four inches, a tick smaller than Freddie Patek and Jose Altuve. All Lloyd could do was octopus field snatch any ball hit near him, but he had no arm and should they keep him on the roster? He did have a soothing impact on teammates, keeping them off balance, meditating one day and getting wine high the next.
Manager Higgins decided to try the old osmosis game he’d learned from the Great Plains – shove two people – in this case, Johnnie Atlas and Lloyd Small in a locked barn and see what comes of it and an interesting development did in fact occur. They came together and discussed and then took action, they tossed a tennis ball through an old 8-pane window that had probably been around since the days of Walter Johnson and they learned over the course of five days how to paint corners with Greg Maddux precision. And they were not the least bit shy to show Manager Higgins their pitching prowess discovery.
It was like a page out of some old book reminding everyone that change can happen in an instant with a minor tweak of a compass like I’m gonna learn how to play the xylophone and what follows are thumbing through a yellow pages and phone calls and visits to a music store and in route meeting a lady with a bird on her shoulder and signing up for music lessons and stopping at a bar and buying a religious man a beer and a shot of Jameson’s and Tuesday becomes Wednesday and suddenly the day and time no longer matters and Lloyd Small and Johnny Atlas become the anger and the calm together and the pennant race is always near. It’s right now.
I was 10 years young and had never thought about suicide when former Milwaukee Brewer Danny Thomas hung himself in prison and my dad wasn’t one of those dads who sat me down insisting I watch One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Midnight Cowboy, and Apocalypse Now. But he did play catch with me and maybe that guarded me from the not so pleasant realities that await us all….old age and in the case of Danny Thomas – broken dreams after being drafted in the 1st round (6th overall), mental health issues, him “knowing he wasn’t right,” joining the World Wide Church of God and not playing Friday sundown to Saturday sundown, 175 career at bats, charges of raping/sodomizing a 12-year old girl and ultimately suicide.
And then four years passed and Danny Thomas was still dead and the only thrills I knew were opening up packs of baseball cards and hitting line drive singles and the sing song voice of Melissa García. I wish I had more guts or smarts back then. I would have asked Melissa to take a walk along the the Milwaukee River. We could have held hands and kissed behind the Dairy Queen, next to the endless railroad track and I bet I would have remembered her eyes forever. Instead, I invited Melissa to a movie. Bad idea. No chance to talk. And then after the movie, I was too scared to kiss her or even ask her for a soda at Fitzgerald’s Pharmacy. As it turned out, I remembered her forever anyway.
I wore a winter hat in spring back then, a Cleveland Browns sand knit cap. I was afraid of nuclear disaster and dreamed of building a bomb shelter. Thankfully, I had my own bedroom and stacks of baseball cards and we had a color TV so I could watch every Brewers road game with Mike Hegan and Jim Paschke calling the action on WVTV channel 18, but then Tony Kessler came into my life and his promise of a “thrill” and the way he said it stuck out like a raft to the other side, one I never thought I’d be interested in. Then my failure with Melissa García happened and something began to eat away at me and I couldn’t stop thinking that maybe there was more and so I tagged along with a bunch of other friends, Tony in the lead, and we walked north for a good 30 minutes in a crowded forest of trees and eventually there was an opening and water below us and I immediately felt like I was atop Fenway Park’s Green monster looking 30 feet down, only there wasn’t a warning track or grass…there was water and rocks jetting out like shark fins.
I figured it was a place to wander down the ravine and maybe fish and swim, but Tony Kessler had other things on his mind and before he jumped, he dared us all to follow him and his bravery and risk taking didn’t surprise me because he had told us all that he planned on committing suicide before graduating high school. And so while he was in the air, I thought about him saying 18 years was enough and what my dad had told me about Koufax quitting while he was on top because of his arm and I later learned from the baseball encyclopedia my dad gave me that Koufax’s last season was a huge success – 27 wins and a 1.73 ERA.
As Tony emerged from the water below, he had a clenched fist raised up above his head like a Jesse Owens brother of the struggle salute. He howled, head skyward like a wolf and from that moment on, I thought of him as an Adam, a first and fearless man, someone who lived with one foot in life and the other foot in death, and that death must have fuelled his fearlessness and so I jumped too and thank God I managed to not hit any of the rocks, thank God because in the back of my mind were the Brewers being in the World Series two years earlier and how thrilling that felt and how much I wanted them to be there again. We all jumped and jumped three and four more times and we all survived and Tony Kessler did as he swore he would, he disappeared a few weeks before graduation and no one knew where he went or whether or not he killed himself and I guess it didn’t matter because we all needed that kind of mystery, that unknown as our own ferris wheels started spinning.
It was so many years later and yet she’d still appear in my dreams as a savior, rescuing me from quicksand or a tidal wave and in that I was never a good swimmer, never caught the rhythm of a stroke, not even doggy paddling, I figured it a good idea to find her number and call her, just to see how she was doing, but all I could find was an address so I sent her a letter. She was a writer, mostly plays and poetry. My letter went something like this…
Dear Brandy, I hate starting a letter with “Dear” but I’m nervous. I just wanted to once again apologize for the way things turned out. I know it usually takes two to screw up a romantic situation, but I feel mostly responsible. Anyway, I read a good one the other day and thought of you and wanted to share it…..
a little girl climbs up the steps and knocks on the attic door.
“come in,” says the voice.”
“what’s a good day daddy?” she asks.
daddy looks up from the typewriter and says, “a good day my dear is 10 pages.”
P.S. I still have the puzzle you gave me, that map of America with all the baseball stadiums. I glued the back and put it in a frame and it’s on the wall now so you’re kind of always with me as long as I’m alive and enjoy a place where I can sleep and dream.
I remember when Brandy and I first met. It was at a McDonald’s, back when I had the courage to strike up conversations with strangers. I told her I was thinking about joining the Air Force which wasn’t true. I’m afraid of flying. But I pretended that my interest in the air force was because Jimi Hendrix was in the Air Force for a short while and Jimi Hendrix was my favorite guitar player which was true and he was from Seattle and I always felt a debt of gratitude to Seattle for being the birthplace of the Milwaukee Brewers franchise as the Pilots in 1969 and that was true too. Brandy didn’t know anything about Jimi Hendrix or baseball and I didn’t know anything about poetry or theater so we had a lot to share. We talked that first day about McDonald’s once offering pizza and how plumbing probably saved the world from massive diseases and then where we were born, any brothers and sisters and then that led us to talk about how we got along with our parents and what we hoped to do with the rest of our lives.
I was reluctant to keep talking, not having much experience with women and all that, but it was as if she could read my mind or maybe she picked up on my fear because of my body language, me looking desperately for a place to hide my hands. She pondered out loud the thrill a child experiences when they wander beyond the confines of a predictable backyard. After she said that and without really knowing why, I accepted her invitation to meet at the same McDonalds later that same week and after agreeing I kind of felt at ease or more at ease anyway and so I told her about Richie Hebner once being a gravedigger in the off season, that players used to not make so much money. It was my way of trying to turn her onto the endless cast of characters in baseball. And it was a bingo bulls eye on my part.
“I assumed players always made a lot of money,” she said, “way more than teachers and what not.”
She was excited to learn something new and apparently it inspired her too because she replied with a confession. She looked at her hands and said,
“I take so much for granted, like how my mind and body are connected like I send a message from my mind to my legs and they lift and it’s one foot in front of the other and locomotion….far out!”
This inspired me to talk about the locomotion of base stealers and Ron LeFlore transitioning from prison to playing major league baseball. I soon learned that Brandy had a pet bird, a monk parakeet that she said she found, wounded in a Brooklyn bus cabin. She knew all about these parakeets.
“In such a cold climate like Brooklyn?” I asked, more than a little surprised and very excited by the strange geography of it all.
Brandy said the parrots escaped from a crate at JFK airport and the rest was birds and bees proliferation history. There was then a long pause and I mentioned the size of a horses toe nails and what was so great about our conversation was that there were no rules, just one random thing after another and breakfast coffee turned into a fish sandwich lunch and then we walked in Greenwood Cemetery and she took off her socks and shoes and of course I thought about Shoeless Joe Jackson and told her about the Black Sox scandal and for some reason or no reason we stopped and right in front of us was Henry Chadwick’s tombstone and it was all too much, too perfect because I had just begun to study a bit about Sabermetrics and I knew Chadwick was kind of the godfather of the box score and he knew way back when that a defender with more range was bound to make more errors so range was as important as the number of errors committed. I loved the logic in that, but it was my emotions that took over at that point which was rare for me.
“I have a 1976 Topps Lymon Bostock card,” I said. “He was shot and killed and every once in a while I look at the card and remember the fragility of life and I also have a Mike Hargrove card from the same set and he took his time in the batter’s box and that reminds me to take my god damn time too, that there’s no rush.”
Immediately after I said that, I looked down at Brandy’s naked feet and I swear she was flexing her toes as if they were yawning, but I knew it wasn’t out of boredom or fatigue, more of a relaxing feeling like she wanted me to keep talking.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t tell Brandy much about advanced metrics, but that year we shared together…wow! and after it was done, I returned to Milwaukee and got to see Robin Yount get his 3,000th hit. I forget who the pitcher was, but the hit was a patented Yount line drive single to the opposite field.
It was like no other year because there was talk about Milwaukee Brewer’s shortstop Pat Listach winning the rookie of the year and the Brewers had never had a rookie of the year before. It was still only August, 1992 but Brewers fans couldn’t help thinking back to first kisses and first drunk nights and in the case of Johnnie Raddle, a first homerun he hit over his little league fence. He was 48 years old when he hit it, yes 48 and no he wasn’t pretending to be Satchel Paige and play forever. He had hit one on a bounce to the fence when he was 12, but never over that fence so he recruited one of his roommates who they called the Squibbler because of a pasta dish he made and together they walked to Watertower Park and the Squibbler threw one pitch after another and Johnnie Raddle eventually hit one over the 200 foot fence and for the first time in his life he got to take that slow trot around the bases and ever since then, he started to buy people drinks at bar time.
Listach was hitting well above .250 and already had 45 stolen bases and doing whatever else it might take to win the rookie of the year prize. Johnnie Raddle and the Squibbler and three other tenants at 2345 North Nachman Avenue celebrated the Listach excitement by buying a cat and naming him Listach and it was that same day that Johnnie Raddle decided to switch gears in mid career course, surrendering his financial advisor job at the First Wisconsin building for a masters degree in physics at University Wisconsin Milwaukee, a ground level pursuit, to better understand how the universe works.
And that’s when they started to call Johnnie Raddle the Tinker Man because they knew he was gonna be poor after surrendering his big financial salary to become a student. They made jokes about him peddling on the avenue old pots and pans, yeh, the Tinker Man. He called for a group meeting and asked if he could squat in the attic for a nominal fee of 200 bucks a month.
No one complained because they could get the Tinker’s 200 for the attic which would give them an extra 200 to spend on beer and brewers tickets plus a new roommate which would make six of them.
The Tinker Man fixed up the attic nice and good too with a bed and a desk and a window
The new tenant Artie Hemlock didn’t say much and it seemed like he didn’t listen either because he often didn’t answer the other tenant’s questions and had a habit of fleeing rather suddenly in the middle of a conversation. But no one minded because he paid the rent and never complained about them making noise when the Brewers were on the west coast.
They later learned that Artie couldn’t hear out of one ear and his other one wasn’t so great either. He knew nothing about baseball so the Tinker Man took him to a game. The five of them typically sat in the bleachers because they were benches instead of assigned seats and so that’s where Artie and Tinker Man sat and Artie didn’t understand why the Tinker Man brought binoculars, but he didn’t mind either because seeing was what he did most on account of him not hearing so well.
The Tinker Man gave Artie the binoculars and told him to focus on the plate.
“Home plate,” he explained, “where the umpire and batter are. You see them standing there together, the umpire crouched a bit like he’s leaning on the catcher’s back.”
The Tinker Man looked over at Artie and his smile said it all. He had seen the catcher flashing signs towards the pitcher.
“Sign language,” he said.
And later in the game, The Tinker Man told Artie to aim the binoculars at the manager and then at the third base coach and then Listach took off and ran to second and stole the base and there was another smile on Artie’s face.
“More sign language,” he said.
It was later that same night that Artie asked if Listach the cat was named after Listach the rookie.
his parents and grandparents and just about everyone in the family believed in psychiatrists and for christmas they bought each other psychiatrist coupons. One kid they had in the family was named Harry and he became a fan of baseball when he was really young and no one knew how or why because no one in the family liked baseball, but Harry did and he knew all the teams and all the players and he had favorites and not favorites and he delivered newspapers for a living and lived at home with his parents so he didn’t have to make too much money and so he had season tickets to all 81 games and that’s where he yelled at players and some players laughed at Harry and other players got pissed off at him, but Harry felt better because he was getting all his stress and anxiety off his chest and so the family didn’t need to sign him up for a psychiatrist meeting and some of the family even started to watch baseball and see what it was all about.
Ahhhh, good ol’ Mr. and Mrs. Spore, Bible beaters, espousing the sorrows of Job and King David. They never took to baseball, never talked much either and no one knew where they came from or where they got all their money, but they bought the house across the street from Gould’s Cemetery and would sit on the front porch every dusk to dole out change to beggars and watch the sun set. Their youngest son Benoit joined them, refusing to socialize with kids his own age. Mr. Spore set up a lawn chair for him, but then somewhere around his 16th birthday, he pointed towards Audie Langdon Park, beside the cemetery, and Benoit knew what he was hinting at. He dropped his head and dragged his feet there, to the park, sad and scared, where other kids, on the verge of leaving their teens hung out, to watch washed up top prospects, most of them drafted by big league teams with dreams of making it to the majors, but it didn’t work out for one reason or another so they came together, shipwrecked, to play and there were hard slides, brush backs, more of an old time atmosphere, no patting the opposition on the butt and joking with fielders when on base.
They went all out too, chalking fair/foul lines, cutting the grass, hiring an umpire, but like their careers, the perfection didn’t last long. The first batter dug his back foot in the dirt, messing up the chalked batter’s box like a dog marking its territory and ditto for the pitcher on the mound. Many of the players hailed from the Dominican Republic and when their baseball careers didn’t amount to much, they feared the backlash from those back home who lived vicariously through them so they hung around America and with broken English, took odd jobs – construction work, dishwashing, prep cook, garbage men. Others earned degrees from the local university, perfected their English and went the academic route becoming translators or professors.
One of the pitcher’s, Javier Iglesias, a southpaw, didn’t grow up in poverty. He came from a middle class family in San Pedro de Macorís and spoke nearly perfect English. He got drafted by the Chicago Cubs in 2004, 23rd round, sent to the Northwest League, Class A short season, in Boise, Idaho, to play for the Hawks. He gladly shared his stat line with the boys.
“I recorded 37 k’s in 23 innings” he boasted and then in a hushed whisper, he added, “with a 7.50 ERA.”
Benoit knew about Idaho, knew Harmon Killebrew was born there, in Payette, a mere 59 miles from Boise and he knew that Killebrew hit 573 home runs and more importantly, had “Brew” in his name and Benoit took this as an omen, a good one, to visit Bostock’s bar and grill, a place of initiation where older men believed it their mission to introduce teenagers into the “kingdom of drink,” to learn how to stand your ground, to debate about politics, discuss history and music and discover one’s favorite beer and booze and discover other’s favorites too, so when bar time arrived, you could buy a drink for a stranger and one for the bartender too!
Javier took a liking to Benoit, on account of him asking all kinds of questions, from the steak joints in Boise to the playing fields in the Dominican to baseball history and when the conversation came around to George Bell, also from San Pedro de Macorís, and his 265 career homeruns, Benoit, already stooped in numbers and statistics enjoyed a revelation, that if you add up Bell’s bombs, 2+6+5, it equalled 13 and though many shied away from the doomsday number of bad luck, Benoit welcomed it as a reminder, a promise that bad luck would be followed by good luck and then bad luck and then good luck, a see-saw of slumps and streaks all baseball players must endure, from Drysdale’s shutouts to Blass’s loss of control.
Javier was the only player not embittered by his own failure. He believed in passing on the torch to young baseball players, determined to see talent sprout, unlike first baseman Thatch Foray, a midwestern kid with a blazing 100 mph fastball who failed in the locker room banter, too self conscious and paranoid, conditions he never overcame, blacklisted from the professional game. He, like Javier, eyed the boys, but Thatch did it out of spite because he never had a father and his older brother never bought him beer or taught him how to de-seed a bag of weed. He looked long and hard at Benoit, never moving a muscle, a stare down like prize fighters in the center of the ring, the judge explaining the rules, the boxer’s eyes glued on each other, but not Benoit. He didn’t look. He became quiet, felt awkward, and didn’t know where to put his hands.
“You weirdo,” Thatch yelled at Benoit. “You flake.”
That word “flake” inspired Benoit. For a change he didn’t turn the other Jesus cheek, no water off his back. He charged after Thatch and when he got close enough, he ducked down and wrapped his arms around Thatch’s legs, a picture perfect tackle as Thatch fell back and hit the ground hard. No one interfered. Instead, a circle formed around them, an impromptu boxing ring.
Benoit pointed his finger at Javier and smiled, maybe for too long a time because it was Thatch’s turn. He came charging towards Benoit, tackled him and sent him backwards onto the ground, exactly as Benoit had done to him.”
“Eye for an eye,” laughed the scrappy second baseman from Reno.”
Benoit jumped to his feet. Punches were thrown, one landing on Benoit’s right eye followed by another in his gut. It was then that Javier stepped in and broke up the fight. And like any baseball brawl, the others followed, no one really interested in fighting, arms wrapped around the instigators “to hold them back,” peace prevailing and back to the game.
Benoit walked home with bruises and a bloody lip and his father, Mr. Spore, on the porch, as always around dusk, smiled at Benoit and without asking what happened, didn’t need to, for he knew in his gut that his son had entered the ring and now understood suffering.
That night, Mr. Spore bought his son a fielder’s glove and as is sometimes the case, synchronicity happened. The next day the boys were invited to play.
Ally McCallister was ready to make the move into a full blown religious life, to be appointed a husband and have children and hopefully give birth to a new kind of messiah. A used mini van would follow to portage the children across bridges, to open fields, to contemplation the unknown.
But something held Ally back…
She sat at a table of the local library, as she did every Tuesday morning, to discuss the day’s news with strangers, but a distraction set in – a man outside, staring through the window at Ally or that’s what she perceived anyway and to confirm her hunch she waved and the man, stiff as a scarecrow acknowledged her with a wave of his own and then he rolled his fingers towards himself, an indication for her to come outside and greet him and though Ally’s mom was a mute, she always insisted via scribbles on a pad of paper that the world was filled with a cast of characters and to never fear a stranger and so with that in mind, Ally took that most important first step into the unknown and went outside to meet this man and he handed Ally a piece of a paper and whispered, – “This is an autograph of a baseball player” and then he turned and walked away like some impossible specter. Ally watched as the man faded, getting smaller and smaller, melting into the horizon. She turned her attention to the name, to the autograph, and couldn’t make out who it was which came as no surprise because she knew so little about baseball.
Alley McCallister’s family believed in psychiatrists like they did crossing guards and ferry boat drivers, portaging people to the other side. The McCallister clan hired Dr. Foreplay and often invited him to lounge around on the patio after lunch on cool autumn days and his silence at just the right moment endeared the family into a life long commitment to him. He helped Ally, the oldest, more than any of the other children. He fed her a healthy dose of Blatz beer to loosen her up and take her to the open spaces, those unchartered regions of her mind. He focused on the tackle box nature of Ally, the way she compartmentalized her day to day activities. She made lists in the morning of what to do and never veered from the course and each and every day was, as much as possible, the exact same, the newspaper in the morning, work as an office clerk, fishing at dusk, dinner, more beer, and sleep. “Uptight anal retentive flake” insisted the bar flies. The palm readers said it was from fear of death. Father O’Dowd blamed it on a demon named Pawdust, the oldest demon known to man; the one that convinced cave men that chaos was the only option and death was always near, that there was no hope. Doctor Foreplay encouraged her to ignore all the noise and keep the course, “that one day it would happen.”
Ally had no idea what would happen, but that autograph and who it was kept her going. It became an obsession, a compulsion. Nothing else mattered and so she visited Slaton’s Saloon with a baseball collage on its walls and hanging TV tuned to the Brewers game and she liked the name Brewers because she liked the Blatz beer Dr Foreplay gave her and so she sat at the rail with that autograph and asked Brewers fans and when she heard no answer, other than one guy slurring….” I see a B and R in there, maybe Billy Joe Robidoux.”
“You just like that name because it rhymes,” replied the bartender.
“Yeh, remember how the PA man used to stretch out his last name……Rohhhhhhhh-Be-Doh,” suggested Calvin, seated at the end of the rail. In the end no one was really sure, but as is often the case with beer and inhibitions loosened, Calvin invited Ally to the Brewers game at County Stadium. Ally had never been to a game and she remembered what Dr. Foreplay had said, almost promised – “that one day it would happen.”
And so she played hookie from her routine and work and said yes, I’ll go and Calvin never stopped talking at the game, so eager to explain it all to the baseball virgin Ally McCallister, the chalk line of fair versus foul, the square bases and pitcher’s mound and rosin bag and suicide squeezes and sacrifices and bleacher creatures and players exploding out of the dugout like bottle rockets and taking their positions, but it was the scorecard that sucked Ally in and the symbols Calvin scribbled on to the paper, like code, like Hieroglyphics and she felt a never before desire – to learn a new language, an extinct one like the Etruscans or one where baseball had never been born – Iran and its Persian tongue and maybe, just maybe, they could all get together and build runways to welcome extra terrestrials, but eventually she caught her breath and dropped the utopian fantasy and settled on buying Calvin a Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and they drank beer from paper cups and watched the game and got drunk and after the game, while stumbling down the ramp from the upper deck , they turned over the empty paper cups and stomped them and what a boom they made, echoing and some fans looked on with judgmental sneers, but a few of them joined and stomped paper beer cups too and a new moon could be seen through the fences.
Harry Stagginovitz took a long look in his sister’s eyes and despised the mascara so he turned away, turned away from the world, but then he turned back because it was the day their grandfather was to be buried and he needed to be there according to his mom even though he didn’t know his grandpa too well, just the legend, that during his last three years when delirium and depression and paranoia ruined his logical explanations of things, he still knew that old baseball games could bring him back to some semblance of himself – to Leonard Stagginovitz and he had hundreds and hundreds of baseball games, radio broadcasts, tapes and no one knew where he got them, but they were like medicine in that each one cured a different ailment and he knew which one to play to tackle the specific problem… A 10-0 shutout with no homeruns stopped a depression episode. A pitcher’s duel with plenty of errors mellowed his paranoia. A game that ended in a walk-off resulted in him calling his wife “honey bee” again and she was already dead.
Harry wasn’t like his grandfather. He didn’t like baseball….didn’t know it….didn’t have a father so there was no catch, no baseball card gifts, no pilgrimage to the local stadium. He did however have a falcon hook of a nose, thick lips, long straight black hair and piercing blue eyes. And people took notice of him and Harry handled the attention quite well. He developed a strut and a provocative lean against a wall or tree that accentuated his features and melted a girl’s vows.
Father Three Springs knew Harry’s mother quite well and he told her to sedate Harry and have a vasectomy performed, an outrageous suggestion to make for an 18-year old boy especially for a mother who longed for grandchildren, but she agreed.
“We aren’t out of the woods yet,” he told Mrs. Stagginovitz. “His good looks might still ruin him.
And Father Three Springs was right. By the time Harry turned 19, he had already enjoyed a dozen lovers and showed no signs of letting up, fully embracing the notion to “accept loss forever” and so it was with a Julia one month followed by a Vanessa the next and so on, a new Trail of Tears as Harry’s lovers became tailpipe Annies as he zoomed away and Harry didn’t care. He made his intentions clear right from the git-go, to know as many people as possible and after the initial rush of intimacy, he lowered the temperature to platonic, but the world didn’t want that, couldn’t tolerate it, too light and free. Harry became an enemy of the people and this weighed on his wellbeing.
He began to hunch over and talk out loud when no one was around. He rejected Father Three Spring’s offer of a God who would listen, instead choosing to talk to strangers on the 2nd floor of the new McDonalds on 6th and Clem. It was there with his head down, he fell asleep and was in and out of dreams and one stayed with him, about shortening his family name from Stagginovitz to Stagg. He didn’t decipher dream symbols and their meanings too well, but that name Stagg had potential; it was American, canned food American, chili, a hint of the wild west and red granite peaks and saguaro cacti and big skies. Snakes. Sun. Starting over.
Harry bought a tent, sleeping bag, and butane-fueled hot plate and escaped to Moonshine Park and like Wade Boggs did with chicken; he enjoyed a can of Stagg Chili every day and as satisfying as it was, he began to look at everyone with suspicion.
One early spring day, a man in a long beige rain jacket and oversized dress pants walked up to the bench where Harry was sitting and skipped all “nice weather, how do you do” formalities, took a look at Harry from head to foot and said the word “potential,” and then excitedly continued to speak….”The Mariners are the only team that has never been in a World Series, not a one in their entire existence, but that doesn’t stop them and their fans and so a butterfly flaps its wings, a turtle takes another step and we best be moving onward too.”
“Where?” asked Harry.
“A surprise. You like surprises, don’t you? My name is Stanislaus but I’m no patron saint so just call me Stan. I’ll tell you this…when I watched Hoyt Wilhem and Wilbur Wood and Phil Niekro throw the knuckleball, I discovered what was happening right in front of me.”
“And what was that?”
“A butterfly in flight.”
Harry had never heard the names, but he liked the idea of a ball moving like a butterfly. He reached into his bag and removed a can of Stagg.
“You want to share a can,” he asked. “It’s Carolina Hot.”
And they shared a first supper of chili and Stan didn’t need a nap after eating.
“Now about that surprise,” said Stan. “Let’s go.”
“Go where?”
“To my car.”
It was a red fleetwood cadillac. Old. Big. Welcoming. Harry slipped into the passenger seat and off they went, in no particular direction.
“Roll down your window,” encouraged Stan. “I’ll turn on the radio. The game oughta be starting soon.”
Harry thought about his grandfather. The radio. The games. The tapes. The cure.
My name is Sammy and I am a despicable creature, no more important than a mouse or a mosquito, a good for nothing snot, no better than a scrap around the rim of a toilet bowl that refuses to flush. The only human being I talk to is Harold the crossing guard and just the other day, he moved to Oregon.
I think Harold moving is why I grabbed the glass turtle beside my bed and considered throwing it against the wall for a little smashed glass good luck, but before I could carry out my grandpa’s ancient practice, I walked outside and spotted a crow, hopping on weak feet, eager to pounce on road kill and I preferred that over any good luck charms. That crow inspired me with a hunter and gatherer attitude and this put a little oomph in my will, not the kind of will you write to give your stuff to people after you die, but rather, the will to do something and so I spray painted St. Pascals’ sidewall, drank malt beer behind the post office and rode a shopping cart down McGibbon’s Hill. I also bought an old boom box and blasted heavy metal music and road a bus downtown and tried my hand at a free vegetarian pot luck and felt so damn good after eating rutabaga that I attended a polka dance church festival and forgot what day it was.
And then one one morning my alarm clock didn’t sound and I took it as a sign and maybe it was paranoid delusion, but I spotted a never before seen bird and that inspired me to run around town and I’m kind of fat so running is not my thing but I ran and eventually stumbled on a pile of books in a back alley with a sign that said FREE. I guess a family was moving or feeling generous. I found a copy of the book Obscure Defenses by Erving Monclusive. It was about the martial arts and pretty much anyway to defend yourself and attack too.
I read the book before bed and upon waking, a chapter here, a chapter there. I skipped all the weaponry, pretzel like moves, and deep breathing, kung fu kick-somersault-Judo-chakra on and on. Instead, I dropped anchor on pages 77-88 and perused the “how to stink up the enemy” chapter, whether it be by halitosis or general body odor because a strong stench sent the opposition scurrying for greener pastures or pastors, sometimes both. And after weeks of not showering and rubbing coffee grinds on my armpits, I rode those city buses and felt like an untouchable because people didn’t want to sit anywhere near me and my stench and so I was awarded space and that got me thinking about outer space and life on other planets and places I would like to go.
I camped out beside dumpsters and when it was raining, I hopped inside and it worked wonders because of all those potato peels, marinades, and rotten milk. The entire city became my enemy and I guess in boxing speak, I was undefeated with multiple knockouts because no one came near me.
Some, however, did petition town hall, begging people in power to carry out the old Bobby Cox heave-ho, to get me kicked out of the city, banned, to never return, and it sort of worked. The local baseball team, the Cliftons, wouldn’t let me in the game, but that’s why I say “sort of” because the manager of the Cliftons, Ivan Fumigator, secretly turned a blind eye or blind breath. He seduced me with a bag of foul smelling compost into his less than perfect office….a half eaten hamburger on the desk and bags of open chips and ashtrays filled with butts. It was a little paradise to me and it’s where we discussed strategy, not so much euphus pitches or suicide squeezes, but a way to bottle my infamous smell and with the help of Henny the Chemist, we succeeded in transforming the smell into an invisible paste for Clifton pitchers to apply to the ball in that old game of doctoring and that ball went up and then down and then back up again and it ruined a batter’s concentration and though I was escorted out of the manager’s office and told to never return, for the first time in my life, I had a reason to be.
brewers baseball and things 