by Ezra Sidran
“Hey, Doc, Bill c’mon in! You playing hooky from school today, Doc?” I was pretty embarrassed about having to explain why I wasn’t teaching today but it didn’t matter because Andy didn’t wait for my reply. “Don’t worry about the boss today, Doc, he’s out of town.”
The owner of the River Rats and I didn’t exactly see eye-to-eye anymore ever since he tore down the old press box, put up a row of luxury suites and started charging for parking. In fact I may have made a few comments about how this behavior was un-American and contrary to the very egalitarian nature of baseball itself, which was the backbone of our republic. And, in all fairness, I admit that it was probably an exaggeration when I said that his actions were the primary factor in the collapse of modern day society and America’s loss of respect in the world’s eyes when, obviously, it was only a contributing factor; albeit a major contributing factor.
I introduced Kate to Andy and the four of us walked over to the Rat’s bullpen which was far out along the left field line. Colt Brankowsky, who had pitched the day before (a nice little three-hitter for his tenth win of the season, waved to us. “I heard you on the radio yesterday. Do you really think I’m going up?”
When I was a kid ballplayers were normal-sized people. They looked just like everybody else. That just isn’t the case anymore. I’m not going to get sucked into the whole steroid argument; I don’t know who’s doing it and who isn’t. Colt, however, was just a naturally damn big kid. He’s nineteen, six foot four, doesn’t have an ounce of body fat and can chuck a baseball ninety-five miles an hour more times than not right over the outside corner of the plate. Technically, he was once clocked at 102 miles per hour, but nobody had thought to calibrate the radar gun with a tuning fork in about a month so the speed was more than a little suspect. “Well, Bill’s pretty sure you’re going up,” I answered.
Colt looked at Bill and Bill wagged his tail. Bill had sat out in the bullpen during plenty of games and they were old friends. “Are they going to take out Bill’s pacemaker and give it to the Vice President?” Colt asked and you could see he was really worried.
“Naw, Colt, it’s Bill’s forever. Don’t you worry.” I motioned to Kate. “I’m going to show my friend around the old ball yard; you guys keep an eye on Bill for me?” Andy and Colt nodded and smiled conspiratorially. “And no more than one hotdog per inning, okay? And I’m going to count the wrappers when I get back.”
Kate and I climbed up the third-base bleachers until we got to the top row and I motioned for Kate to turn around. The Mississippi, dark and vast, curled around the outfield fences and flowed to the horizons in both directions. Below us Andy’s field was an immaculate carpet; the players were in a circle performing the ancient ritual of pre-game calisthenics.
“My God, Jake! What a view!” In the distance a tug pushing a dozen barges downriver started to make the sharp turn to skirt Dynamite Island.
I looked up and pointed to the luxury suites blocking out most of the Midwestern sky. “Yeah, well now the rich folks get the best view.”
“Jake, did you really say that luxury suites were the cause of the collapse of American society?”
“A contributing factor; I meant to say that they were a contributing factor. And don’t forget the designated hitter rule. That didn’t help, either. They are the first steps down that slippery slope to the end of civilization as we know it.”
Kate laughed and sat on the top bleacher. “What are you going to do now?” she asked. “No job, no money.”
“Bill and I will get by; we always do. We’ve been worse off,” though, in truth, I couldn’t think of a worse time in my life. “I’ll send out some resumes, kick some rocks, something will crawl out eventually; it always does.”
The wind picked up from off the river and lifted the dark curls from Katelynn’s face. “Tell me about baseball,” she said.
“Well, I guess I’m old school,” I said, “I love the symmetry of the game, the mathematics and the statistics. I played as a kid, of course, but I knew I didn’t have the talent to make a career of it. I never could hit that breaking ball. That didn’t bother me. I would rather sit up here,” with you, I thought, “and enjoy the game. You know, originally my dissertation was supposed to be about designing an artificial intelligence to manage a baseball team.” I laughed. “Gilfoyle wouldn’t approve it. He wanted me to do the wargame stuff.”
Kate turned towards me and her face glowed in the warm sunlight. “Why would he do that?” she asked.
“There’s Defense Department money in wargame research. I don’t think the National League is concerned about finding a computer replacement for Tony La Russa just yet,” I answered. “You know there’s a theoretically perfect way to arrange the nine man batting order that would maximize a team’s hits. Every man that gets on base is a potential run and every man that’s left on base at the end of an inning is a lost opportunity. It’s an interesting game theory problem. The number of possible lineups for a nine man team is nine factorial; you know 9 times 8 times 7 times 6 times 5 times 4 times 3 times 2 times 1.”
Kate fixed her gaze on the tug disappearing behind Dynamite Island. “362,880.”
“What?”
“There are 362,880 possible lineups for a baseball team,” Kate said.
I was floored. “Did you just figure that out?”
“Uh huh.”
“In your head? That’s incredible!”
Kate just smiled sweetly.
The wind shifted again, blowing down the right field line. It would be a lefty’s day at the ballpark. Katelynn bought peanuts from Leonard, the toothless vendor, so ancient it seemed like Weissman Stadium was built up around him back in ’31. We drank a couple of beers. I taught Kate the arcane glyphs and symbols used to record every play in a baseball game. It was a wonderful day. We lost 4-3.
We held hands and walked back down the bleacher steps to the bullpen. There were a pile of shiny hotdog wrappers and empty plastic beer cups surrounding Andy, Bill and Colt. “The fifth inning went long,” Andy began. “And with all those hotdogs we got thirsty,” Colt continued. Bill just gave me the look and wagged his tail.
It was a wonderful day.
Day two:
The disconnect notices began to fall down upon me like hail in a Robert Johnson blues. I had been performing financial triage - ‘prioritizing’ my payments for the last month or two - in preparation of funding Bill’s pacemaker, and the priority of paying any money owed rated far below Bill’s life. At least that’s how I saw it.
That’s not how Mr. Puffit, the slumlord, saw it as he handed me an eviction notice that morning. Nor was it the view of Mrs. Ganpatarami, the heavily accented Indian woman at the utility company, who seemed to take some personal satisfaction in announcing that the electricity to our little yellow house would be terminated promptly at 5:00 P.M. today. This wasn’t schadenfreude; this was more than her getting some personal joy at leaving an anonymous family (i.e. Bill, Katelynn and me) in the dark and the cold. This was some twisted Stockholm syndrome where she was vicariously living the good life of the billionaire owners of River City Power and Gas while she toiled away in a cubicle in the ominous windowless building that dominated the downtown skyline. I guess I will never understand people. I guess I will only understand Bill.
I sold the Oldsmobile, paid the rent, the utility bill and with the thirty bucks left over Kate and I ate Chinese.
We went to Yen Ching’s for dinner where they had the best Hot and Sour soup in North America; flakes of red pepper floating on an oil slick of viscous broth. You know, if I had a million dollars I think I would decorate an entire room of my house in Early American Chinese Restaurant. Where do all those hanging lanterns and lacquered screens come from? There’s got to be some warehouse – maybe in Chinatown in Chicago – where you order them from. Probably the same place where they print the menus with all the typos for “pressed dusk” and “egg dorp soup”. What do you think?
“You could have had a mill
ion dollars,” the Authoritarian Man said, “but you turned it down. Why would you do such a thing?” he asked with just a hint of sincerity in his voice.
The sonofabitch was probably just trying to weasel some more information out of me so I ignored him and went on.
After the soup, and before the Shrimp Egg Foo Young, Kate looked at me with those translucent green eyes. It made me think of the lyrics from an Annie Lennox song about swimming in the pools of her eyes. Do you know the line?
“No.”
I guess they don’t let you listen to music wherever they keep you. I had an image of a warehouse – somewhere far from the Chinese restaurant warehouse – where they kept all the Authoritarian Men. I wasn’t sure if they slept in bunk beds or if they just packed them into road cases (like my piano) with foam cutouts that were negative images of their bodies. But I digress.
We finished our meals and then the waitress brought out the bill with two fortune cookies.
You know what our fortune cookies said? They were identical:
“Your one true love is sitting across the table from you.”
What do you think the odds of that were? That we would both get the same fortune? I’ve been eating in Chinese restaurants all my life and I’ve never seen that particular fortune before. They are always vague, but upbeat, in a horoscope kind of way. And we both got the same identical cookie. What do you think the odds of that were?
“Pretty good,” the Authoritarian Man said, “considering that Ms. O’Brian slipped both cookies and a ten dollar bill to the head-waiter.”
She really did that?
“She really did that,” the Authoritarian Man said.
Then Kate took a leftover egg roll and neatly wrapped it in two paper napkins and put it in her purse to take home to Bill. All I could do was shake my head as much as the straps would allow. In all my life I had never met a woman like Katelynn O’Brian before; and she didn’t forget Bill, either.
I was falling, falling in love.
Day three:
I pawned my Codie award.
The Codie award is the Oscar of the computer game industry; except it’s not gold-plated. I got $22.50. We ate at Wendy’s. Kate brought home her extra fries for Bill.
Day four:
I was playing that night across the river at Big Papa’s Emporium of Blues with the All Mojo All Stars. It was a dark room with a good, thick sound, low ceiling and a murk of cigarette smoke at about seven and a half feet.
I could taste the memory of the sweet smoke. Can I have a smoke?
“I can’t give you a smoke. You know that.”
We were playing John Lee Hooker’s Boom, Boom, Boom. You know it? “Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Gonna shoot you right down!” We were in the pocket. The place was packed. Do you have any idea what it’s like to be up on stage, playing piano, in a packed bar? Maybe five hundred people packed into a 220 legal limit juke joint, cheek to jowl, ass to ass, sweating in unison, undulating, The Beast was alive, and you’re up on stage and every move you make is wired straight to their spines? And your front man, John the Howler, is doing his job. He is working. He’s on his third costume change of the evening and there are women down front throwing their thongs up on stage! The sweat is pouring.
The sweat is flowing; from the band, from the crowd, from the barkeeps.
They’re working, we’re working, the crowd is working, we are all working. The smoke, the booze, the sound, the: BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, GONNA SHOOT YOU RIGHT DOWN! There is a common heartbeat and it is flowing from my fingers into the piano and out through the Yamaha NS-6490 18-inch 3-Way speakers and out, out into the crowd.
This evening has transcended the normalcy of our wretched lives. We are sweating, humping, pulsing together.
My eyes have rolled back up into my skull and I’m playing blind like all my drunken piano-playing heroes did.
There’s this break that we do.
The drummer does this flam and it’s our cue and we all stop dead, not a sound, just the kick and the snare and the crowd just falls into the space and we catch it on the upbeat and then, and then, and then…
I heard the whitest white voice I ever heard yell, “Play Billy Joel’s Piano Man!” from the back of the room.
John the Howler turned on a dime and stared right at me and my eyes rolled back from up in my skull and my mouth fell wide open and he fixed me with this look that said, “is that white ofay bitch with you?” and I was just gasping and gulping like a goldfish flopping out of water and it was Katelynn O’Brian at the back of the room waving that fucking FedEx envelope.
God bless Clyde, the Foot, the drummer who didn’t miss a beat (because he was physically incapable of dropping a beat) and he went: WHAP! WHAP! WHAP! with total authority on his nine inch deep snare and the entire All Mojo All Star band hit it solid and John the Howler turned on a dime and grabbed the mic (just like James Brown, the hardest-working man in show business) and went down on one knee and growled, “Gonna shoot you RIGHT DOWN!” Oh, dear God, that – as Lord Wellington said after the battle of Waterloo – was “a damn near run thing, indeed,” and the crowd went fucking insane and the front 15 feet of the mass of humanity at Big Papa’s Emporium of Blues was nothing but a dark, thick cloud of sex that rolled up onto the stage and engulfed us all.
The Howler called an early break after that song and Katelynn O’Brian ran up to me backstage and put that fucking FedEx Express letter in my hand.
You know there were two hundred $100 bills enclosed, right?
“Yes,” the Authoritarian Man said.
A plane ticket and twenty-thousand fucking dollars, cash.
“Yes,” the Authoritarian Man said, “we know the exact contents of the envelope.”
After the gig Kate asked me, “Anonymous people send twenty grand in cash pretty often?”
“No, not often, but it does happen on occasion.” Okay, technically not anonymous people; they’re called computer game publishers and it’s after a long, hard negotiation period and then it’s always accompanied by a whacking big contract with codicils and appendices and delivery schedules and terminated with a gold master delivery date. So, I guess, there’s some precedent to this but I usually knew who I was dealing with.
“And this plane ticket,” Kate asked, “Montgomery, Alabama? What’s there?”
“I dunno,” I lied because I knew all too well what was in Montgomery, “I’ll guess I’ll find out when I get there.” I didn’t want to go back to Montgomery, Alabama. I thought I had retired from that job in Montgomery, Alabama. I guess I thought I had retired but I guess they didn’t think I had retired, at all.
If I wasn’t so fucking broke I would have turned this job down cold; you know that, right? This all came down – everything happened – because I lost my job at the college; you understand that? If I hadn’t needed the money - for Bill’s vet bill, for rent, just money to live on - everything wouldn’t have happened the way it did. It was all because I lost my job at the college.
The next morning Katelynn drove me in her rusted Volkswagen bug out to the Moline International airport (that still makes me laugh even here, strapped to this gurney). Bill was in the cramped backseat. I had my worn leather garment bag with the gray pinstriped double-breasted suit packed inside and my red leather attaché case that looked like it had been through two world wars. I kissed Kate; I kissed Bill goodbye. I had bad, bad vibes about this deal. You know Robert Johnson’s Last Fair Deal Gone Down?
You know the song?
The Authoritarian Man said, “No I don’t know that song.”
I said, “It’s your loss. I guess your masters (at the time I thought I was being very clever inserting that dig just there) don’t want you to have a well-rounded education.”
I was so fucked twelve ways to Sunday. Here I am strapped to a gurney in some room north of 45° and I’m trying to trade witticisms with the Authoritarian Man. It’s not like I’m in a bargaining position, if you know what I mean.
“Plea
se continue,” the Authoritarian Man said, adjusting himself in his bedside chair, “You were boarding the plane at Moline International Airport.”
So, I’m flying south to Maxwell Air Force Base, Air University, Wargaming Center. I’m in this pissant twin-engine plane and I’m watching the patch-work fields scuttle away below. This is like a 12-passenger plane and I’m strapped in next to the pilot on this death-ride flying south. We stopped off in St. Louis, refueled, and we started off again further into the heart of the American beast.
“You know the heart of the American beast?” I asked - a clumsy attempt on my part to tease something out from the Authoritarian Man - maybe he would let his guard down for a second and I could determine at least if he was an American. I mean, I don’t think that’s too much to ask: I would just like to know who the fuck it is that has me strapped to this fucking gurney: is it our side or their side?
He didn’t say a fucking word so I continued.
It was early fall when I took off but when I arrived it was mid-summer: a one hundred and ten in the shade summer. They put me up in a motel on Jeff Davis highway.
Jeff Davis highway runs straight into Maxwell.
“We know.”
Just out of curiosity, I asked, do you know what room they put me in?
“It was room 215,” the Authoritarian Man said.
You bastards don’t miss a thing, I thought.
In the morning a black SUV picked me up and drove south down Jeff Davis Highway to the security pillbox that guarded the only break in the razor wire fence at the northern edge of the compound. There a sergeant in dress blues examined the driver’s papers and then turned on a dime - not quite as sharp as John the Howler, but it was a pretty damn good for a white boy - and he snapped off a smart salute and ushered us in. He was wearing a chrome helmet, too. I remember that; how polished it was and how it reflected the blue Alabama sky.
