It was like any other beach with its sand, rocks, and dead branches, but there were no lifeguards, no towers, and no rules and so much water, so much amazing water! Sammy Hopgood didn’t remember who first told him that the town of Makeshift was directly across Lake Turban but he couldn’t see the other side so he just figured the Lake went on forever like an ocean or a sea. Sammy and his friends would go swimming there with shoes on to avoid the rocks scraping their feet.
There was an abandoned boat house on that beach which eventually became the perfect place for them to smuggle beer and booze and weed and get drunk and high and build a fire and listen to Lake Turban’s small waves rolling, but Sammy wasn’t calm enough to really hear the waves and appreciate nature’s simple pleasures and all that. He had too many thoughts racing around in his head like whether or not he should buy a ticket to the Wild Kingdom concert later that night or if Andre Thornton would ever hit 30 home runs again or did they drink all the beer or why was the weed making him overly self conscious and paranoid?
The Clandor river was 20 minutes west of the Lake. As Sammy got older, like after high school, he went more to the river than the lake. It ran north and south. There were nice bridges over it and underneath great places to wander around and fish or swim or spray paint the cement or sleep. One of the bridges was Merryvale Avenue bridge. He used to go down there and do nothing in particular. He did see a deer one time and they looked at each other for at least 20 seconds which felt like a long time because he had never looked at any animal in the eyes for that long.
Sammy went to the town Biltmore once and made kind of a pilgrimage to Hamanhop’s Pub because it was an old hang out for early morning drinkers, been there since the leather factory opened over 70 years ago. Sammy had just completed an unofficial one year internship in the kingdom of drink where he learned how to buy beers for bartenders, be certain about what he wanted to drink and how to make sense even when he slurred after too many beers and whisky.
Hamanhop’s had two levels. Sammy didn’t have to think about where he wanted to drink. Once he saw that upper deck, he climbed the steps. He wanted to hear the voices down below, undecipherable, so many of them all at the same time like jazz fusion. But it was a lot like the small waves at Lake Turban. He couldn’t focus on the beauty in all of it, still lost in his thoughts.
He ordered a pitcher of some local beer and made a point of telling the server, “no glass.” He drank beer from the pitcher just like that and the server musta been keeping an eye on him like a pitcher keeping tabs on a baserunner because as Sammy took his last gulp, she approached him and she was chewing gum and wearing blue lipstick and before asking if he wanted another pitcher, she started reciting what sounded like Shakespeare and well, Sammy didn’t understand any of it so he just pointed at the pitcher and shook his head up and down, a little sign language saying I want another pitcher and she understood and made her way to the tap downstairs and while she was gone, Sammy thought how great it is to be in a world where people who don’t know anything about baseball get excited after learning that baseball stadiums all have different dimensions and that maybe he could tell the server about these different dimensions. And then he thought about the future and how opposed he was to robot umps because he always liked that pitchers and batters had to alter their approaches based on the umpire’s tendencies on any given day and that resulted in so many surprises and he liked surprises.
And the server was back in less than 5 minutes with another pitcher of beer and she was still reciting what Sammy still thought was Shakespeare so he still didn’t understand so he asked her what she was saying, what did it mean and she didn’t even bother introducing herself, she just put the pitcher down and invited him for a coffee after her shift was done and that got Sammy thinking about old baseball stadium bleachers, the ones with wood planks and no assigned seating.
brewers baseball and things 