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.
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.
I heard about her from a mutual friend. He said she had “European habits” which I later found out meant that she didn’t shave her armpits. I met her at school in a class called the Arab/Israeli conflict. We sat in the back of the room. Neither one of us ever raised our hands to ask or answer questions. I was excited to find out that she was the one my friend had told me about, not because of her armpits but because she always wore a green army jacket which might seem superficial, to be interested in someone because of their jacket, but I had another class that year about Asian Religions and the teacher talked at length about American kids becoming interested in Buddhism in the 60’s and that got me thinking about the Vietnam War and green army jackets.
She seldom talked to strangers so I felt kind of special because we talked all the time, before, during, and after class and we sometimes got in trouble for making too much noise and interrupting the professor’s lecture. I remember a few months after the class I bumped into her on the North Avenue Bridge on Milwaukee’s East side. She was crying and confided in me that she had just broke up with her boyfriend. She was contemplating whether or not to turn around and make up with him. I discouraged her not to and we walked together to the other side of the bridge, the side I had started out on so I was going backwards, but I didn’t care. I considered Ana Watermark more than a classmate, not quite a friend, but pretty close. We wandered down the slope to the Milwaukee River and sat and the water seemed to relax her. She stopped crying and we talked for a while.
I don’t remember what we talked about but I like imagining that she told me a story about how a few days earlier, when she started thinking about ending her relationship, she had accepted what looked like a cigarette from an old man in the bus cabin which would be totally out of character because she didn’t even talk to strangers let alone smoke something they gave her. He would be sitting down on one of the rectangular seats and they would be small seats, probably to keep the homeless from spreading out and sleeping there. She would take a puff and quickly realize that she didn’t want to be waiting for the bus anymore and didn’t want to be in that bus cabin either. She would try to bow which she figured was far easier than a hand shake, a fist pump or a look in the eyes, but she wouldn’t even be able to bow which would bother her in that moment because she would know about Japanese bowing and Hideo Nomo. She wasn’t a big baseball fan, but I mentioned it a couple of times during our talks, specifically that they played in Japan which surprised her and then I told her about Hideo Nomo’s two no hitters, one of them being at Coors Field and she remembered his name. That part is true. I did tell her about Japanese baseball and Hideo Nomo, but I can’t say for sure if she remembered that he threw two no-hitters. Anyway, in this imaginary tale, she would just turn and walk away from the old man and out of the bus cabin into the cold breeze.
She would pass the old Elm tree with a red X on it and would begin to think that her personality was a stolen identity or at least that’s what half her mind would insist with the other half far more compassionate, reminding her that it was more of a personality exchange/influence, that it worked both ways. Ana would be terrified of mirrors, more than clowns. She would dread them because they would remind her of what she’d stolen. It’s a wonder she didn’t overdose or jump off that bridge. She would never stay too long in her apartment. Instead, she would loiter in libraries and eat at soup kitchens which is where she would go after exiting the bus cabin, to the free lunch at St. Hedwig’s and the place, as usual, would be packed. As she sat down at the table, some young guy would comment about her red hair and say Rusty Staub had red hair too.
“More musings from the Maggid,” the guy would laugh loudly. “I’m Herschel Smith.”
Ana would be curious about the word Maggid because it was so close to magic and she believed in magic, not just the abracadabra of David Copperfield, but that all of life was magic, that is, when she wasn’t down on herself about being a copycat.
“A Maggid is an itinerant preacher” would say the young man.
An older man who was apparently the young preacher’s father would stumble in front of his boy, a tall bottle of Smirnoff in his hand. He would sit down at the table and slur.
“My dear boy, don’t start with th th th the preaching. Just my llllllluck a brainwashed, blithering boob for a son. Let’s talk about the Padres, the baseball team that has never won a World Series!”
The father would push his chair back from the table and lay flat on the floor, drunk, not the least bit interested in hearing whatever cockamamie his son had to say.
“PADRES,” he would continue, “with Kurt Bevacqua and memories of his bubble gum chewing ways and the Padres are a tribute to the Franciscan Friars. Isn’t that holy enough for you? And plus they had those pitchers who were into the John Birch Society back in the 80’s, not exactly religion, more about politics, but it’s all the same.”
I never told Ana about Tony Gwynn’s swing, but I like pretending that I did and in that moment, I like thinking that Gwynn’s swing would be the only thing she had on her mind, far from the troubles with her boyfriend and far from the feeling she had about stealing other people’s identity. I like to think that Ana walked closer to the father because he knew about baseball and that reminded her of me. The father would still be flat on his back, but awake enough to hand her the Smirnoff and since she had already accepted a smoke from a stranger she took the booze too. The father would then fall asleep and Hershchel the preacher would sit back down at the table, eat some bread and wait for a new victim. Ana, with the bottle in her hand would feel kind of scared or annoyed by the preacher so she would leave her tomato soup, head outside, and finish off the bottle.
And then as is often the case, when you’re thinking about something it starts appearing all over the place and there, that same afternoon in the park, where people typically played chess would be a man and woman rolling strat-o-matic baseball dice, the man holding a 20-sided die in his hand and Ana, by then, not so down on herself, would sit down beside the strat-o-game and when she did , the player at bat with the die in his hand would take a quick look at Ana’s green eyes and not for too long either but he had apparently gathered all he needed because he would then break out into an impromptu lecture about Masaoki Shiki and his involvement with the Haiku and his love for baseball…
“Shiki was a Japanese haiku poet inducted into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame,” he would say, “And a haiku is that 5-7-5 syllable poem.”
I know that Tony Conigliaro has a 5 syllable last name and that Biff Pocoroba’s full name also has five syllables and there must be a first-middle-last baseball name with a 5-7-5 syllable sequence and I know this doesn’t matter much, but still, I wish Ana knew about Conigliaro and Pocoroba and that she wondered about baseball player names, but instead she would say,
one leaf on a tree plucked from an upper deck hand………. paperplane set freeeeeeeeee
And as she said it, she would know for the first time in her life that she was Ana Watermark and no one else was exactly like her. The player holding the 20-sided die would then reach into his pocket and hand Ana a different 20-sided die. Ana, still under the influence of accepting gifts, would smile, say thank you, take the die, and then suddenly she would remember that she had an unopened pack of Marlboros in her green army jacket. She would then walk back to the bus cabin and the same man would be there and he would have figured out a way to get comfortable on the small seats. He would be spread out and sleeping. Snoring. Ana would stuff the unopened pack of Marlboros in his jacket pocket and walk into the future.
Sewer Cap Johnnie spotted her leaning against the front door of the Rosicrucian center. He watched as she flipped a cigarette onto the sidewalk and stomped it. Such a waste of fire, thought Sewer Cap Johnnie. If she would have let the damn cherry fade on its own, he would have scooped it up and smoked like it was the first cigarette of his life. The lady looked down at her red Chuck Taylor high tops and marched towards Boomer’s saloon, on a mission, a drinking one, a parched damsel in need of a glass of beer many drunk, thought Sewer Cap Johnnie, still under the influence of reading a western romance novel.
Sewer Cap Johnnie never lacked the desire to duck into Boomer’s, to drink and be at ease for some rib and ridicule, to share a little human misery, but he couldn’t enter. His armpits let loose a waterfall of sweat just thinking about it. Drinkers would stare at his hands as he struggled to find a place to hide them.
Sewer Cap Johnnie felt more alone in groups than he did at home, drinking a 12 pack of Pabst reading some science fiction book, but lately he’d switch to these western romances and began to daydream of endless rivers and mountain peaks and big skies and gangs of cowboys on horses and that thought once again creeped into his mind, of being part of a community, a tribe, something, anything outside his own mind and there were many choices, from vegetarian Buddhist brunches to bowling and softball teams, Catholic dance club, AA meetings, volleyball/karaoke bar nights and in a best case scenario – being part of a band and communicating without words, and now this Rosicrucian lady. He suddenly needed to know her like some lit-up mystic stripped down to his tightie whities on the church steps insisting to speak with Jesus so he made his way across the street.
The doors were just as Johnnie imagined, flapping wild west saloon doors, the way they couldn’t be back east because of the cold to the bone breezes. Sewer cap Johnnie sat down at the rail and looked at the booth behind him. There was a lady with lipstick and an older man wearing a cowboy hat. They were discussing the war in Gaza and climate change. Sewer Cap Johnnie took a deep breath, turned his head, and stared at the big booze bottles in the mirrored space behind the rail. It was quiet, only the hum of cool air pouring in from the vent. Shadows and sunlight were on the rail. The Rosicrucian lady was at the other end singing in whispers with her head back, eyes up at the ceiling like Valenzuela and beside her was a man with his hand on the rail shaking. She moved from chair to chair, getting closer and closer to Sewer Cap Johnnie who felt his hands shaking and speedy heart beats beginning. She was wearing large rings on many fingers and Sewer Cap Johnnie liked them because he liked gold and silver and aluminum. He collected cans, aluminum cans, all kinds of cans, from Blatz beer cans to Fresca soda cans.
“You one of them Rosicrucians, ain’t you?” mocked the bartender, his finger pointing at the lady, a half smile on his face. “I see it in your rings, see it in your face like some ancient symbols flashing there, right? A magic women with spells? Alright then bring out the incantations and miracles and let’s get this shindig seance rolling. I know I could use some good luck …we all could in here. Our Brewers have never won a World Series, more than 50 years and counting.”
“Well, aren’t you the greedy one,” snorted the lady, “asking for favors before ever finding out my name? And what’s this about Brewers? I’m no baseball maven, but don’t they play a million miles away in Milwaukee?”
“One point for you missy,” said the bartender. “We’re a bunch of Milwaukee expats that drink and commiserate here. So what’s your poison?”
“Jameson’s, no ice and why Boomers?”
“On the house,” said the bartender. “We call it Boomers after George C. Scott, not the actor though he does share the same middle initial C, but this is about the late great baseball player George Charles Scott, also known as “Boomer,” first baseman, played for the Brewers and Red Sox, a big man, a decent home run man and he could also field with the best of them.
“So do you wanna know my name or not?” she asked.
Sewer Cap Johnnie raised his hand, not too familiar with the custom of how to order a drink.
“This ain’t no classroom son,” said the bartender. “Speak up. What do you want?”
“A Pabst if you got one?” he asked and then shoved his hands under the rail.
“Well, if no one is gonna ask,” said the lady. “I’ll tell you. My name is Sally Roundtree.
Sewer Cap Johnnie knew the name, had heard the rumors, that she could talk to strangers she’d been introduced to or who she introduced herself to and she was always looking to get beyond awkward introductions, for the conversation to go on forever extra innings. And it wasn’t a sex thing. She was just out for connection and didn’t care if the guy was married or the girl was married. Some called her harlot, jezebel or abraxas and those not prone to ancient definitions called her bitch, slut, or goddess, and they said it to her face and that made her even more certain of her uncertainty over who she was and what she was becoming.
“And you?” she said while putting her arm on Sewer Cap Johnnie’s shoulder causing both his legs to shake. “What song would you like to hear on the jukebox?”
Sewer cap Johnnie looked down and wondered if she had magic words to make him happy. He still hadn’t looked at her eyes, only at her fingers and the rings. He considered leaving his Pabst and fleeing, but it was too late, he had already smelled her perfume and it reminded him of nothing so no memory prison. He was free to think whatever he wanted.
“Donavan’s Sssssss…Season of the Witch,” stuttered Sewer Cap Johnnie, surprised by his certainty and disgusted and embarrassed by the predictability of his choice, asking a lady with rings on her fingers to play a song about witches, but he said it again, “Donavan’s Sssssss…Season of the Witch,” and then he looked at her naked arm and there was a tattoo of some kind of flying dinosaur.
“My sister did the tattoo. Do you like it? I have two brothers and three sisters and a cutlery set heirloom handed down by my grandmother.”
Sewer Cap Johnnie took a swig from his glass of Pabst and suddenly, unexpectedly, realized that a heart attack, stroke, or choking on a shard of broken beer glass was always imminent so he cleared his throat.
“Yes, I like the tattoo. I like dinosaurs and see no problem with creation and evolution existing side by side.
The bartender filled a shot of Jameson’s and slid it towards Sewer Cap Johnnie.
Sally Roundtree put her hand back on Sewer Cap Johnnie’s shoulder and told him about the house she bought, how she knocked down the walls and how people lived there and did whatever they wanted, each paying what they could for rent and what a carnival it became with painters, plumbers, insurance salesman, married couples, writers, newspaper delivery men….
“you should come join us…”
and with that she raised her arms, waved them back and forth like a Pentecostal devotee and then slipped Sewer Cap Johnnie a card with her address. She downed her glass of Jamesons and danced her way out the western saloon doors.
Sewer Cap Johnnie stood up straight in his chair and knew he was there, in the bar, doing it, drinking with the fellas and a bartender and surviving, shipwrecked on a new land. He ripped up Sally Roundtree’s card and let the pieces fall to the floor. He then reached into his coat pocket, removed three cards and slid them across the rail.
The bartender watched as each one came into focus and his head moved slowly, from one card to the other – a Jackson Chourio, Tyler Black and Robert Gasser, three minor league Brewer’s that could crack the 2024 major league roster. The bartender knew about Chourio’s power speed potential and Black’s incredible OB%, his walk totals for such a young player and he knew about Gasser’s hits + walks/innings pitched ratio and strikeout totals.
The bartender poured a pitcher of Pabst, set up two glasses and walked around the rail and asked,
brewers baseball and things 