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.
brewers baseball and things 