SEASONS IN HELL, VOL. II, NO. 7
August 27- August 29, 2010
Astros (58-69) vs. Mets (63-64)
Citi Field
126th Street & Roosevelt Avenue
Flushing, NY 11368
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The Astros have been playing a lot better lately and, uh . . . oh, hell, just read about it here.
A DAY IN THE LIFE. It was mid-morning on a late spring Saturday – and hot as hell – when I set off down the railroad tracks, heading for I knew not where. Home, possibly. I was wearing metal baseball cleats, and an old style Senior League baseball uniform. I was a Tiger that season, and the team name was spelled out in yellow block letters across the chest of my heavy button-up cotton/rayon jersey, the one with number 12 on the back. The borders of the jersey, from the sleeves to the front flaps, were edged by a double line of similarly colored yellow piping. My pants were all white except for a narrow single line of yellow running from below my belt down to where the elastic was bunched up at my mid-calf, halfway down my bright yellow uniform socks. It was the style back then to have one’s pant leg folded over the elastic at mid-calf, which left only the sides of the stirrups of one’s outer socks showing below the pant leg, over the white sanitary hose worn underneath.
My yellow cap with the white ‘T’ on front was tipped back about halfway on my head, and my shoulder-length hair hung out the back and sides of the cap, and out the front, too, except when I brushed it away from my face. I was beginning to work up a sweat as I walked along in that hot-ass uniform, and pretty soon the hair in my eyes was no longer a problem. I lifted the cap and brushed the damp hair straight back and then put the cap back on, and continued on down the line.
There were tall trees lining the right-of-way on both sides of those tracks, and if one tried hard enough one could imagine being out in the middle of the wilderness somewhere, walking down a lonely trail. But actually, I was walking through neighborhoods that had grown up over the years around the tracks. If I looked through the trees on either side, I could see backyard fances, and sometimes the backyards and people and houses beyond them.
The reason I was walking down the railroad tracks in my baseball uniform is vaguely interesting. I’d been kicked out of my game that morning by my manager, who also happened to be my father. He got pissed off about something I said, something he misunderstood, to tell the truth. But in those days, it did not take much. He was over-sensitive to everything I said, and I was over-sensitive to his reactions. On this day, one thing led to another and – just like that – I was history. I was the team’s starting catcher and one of the better hitters, and I’d been standing in the on deck circle prior to the beginning of the second inning, swinging a 32 oz. wooden bat with a big lead donut on it. I was warming up, and talking to someone, one of my friends, through the 20 ft. tall chain link fence that bordered the field behind the dugouts and backstop.
I don’t remember what I said, but it was nothing to do with my father and it wasn’t directed his way. But he went ape shit, anyway. He was probably pissed off at me for something else I’d done, and was just using the opportunity to vent on me. Really, his life was beginning to fall apart then, but I did not realize it at the time. That probably had something to do with the hair-trigger temper that was a recent development of his when it came to me. But I didn’t understand it. I knew we were too different to be very close, and there was always distance between us. But he used to be pleasant with me, at least. I hated it that now it seemed like I pissed him off on sight.
My only reaction to him going off on me that morning was to look at him like he was fucking crazy. That drove him to distraction. He started off by telling me I was out of the lineup, and to go sit on the bench. I mentioned something about the vicious hangover I had that morning, and that I didn’t get up early on a Saturday and put on a hot uniform just to come out there and sit. “Fine then,” he said, escalating his tone.
“Your out of the fucking game. Get out of the dugout . . . get the fuck out of here.”
“OK. But, can I borrow your car keys?”
“I’ll tell you what. You’re off the fucking team.”
It was the third time that season that he had kicked me off the team; a season which was barely half over. Later on, he would cool off and reinstate me. He always did. I always came back, too. It used to piss me off because he never chose a private moment to boot me off the team, it was always right out in front of everyone, which was embarrassing. He was a real dick about it. Still, for all that, he was my dad, and I didn’t really want to make him look bad, which refusing to come back to the team would have done.
Also, I was 15, and it was my last year in that league, and I was having a terrific season. In the pre-season one of the other dads pointed out to me a small hitch in my swing, barely noticeable, that caused my head to tilt slightly just as the ball was coming into the hitting zone. This resulted in me just missing some fat pitches, and popping up some more. Once I got the hitch straightened out, I started hitting the fuck out of the ball, better than I ever had. I’d always had some power, but that spring was unreal. I was leading the league in home runs, and it seemed like everything I hit either went over the fence or bounced off of it.
So my motives weren’t pure, but I knew I’d be back in the lineup the next week. The times before when I’d been kicked out, my mom or another parent or a friend had given me a ride home. But that morning my mom was doing something else, and no one else was there who could give me a lift. There were train tracks running behind the bleachers and a stand of tallow trees on the first base side of our field, so I made my way through the trees and started walking down the tracks in the general direction of our house, three or four miles away. I knew those tracks went through the Southern Pacific switching yard under the overpass at the end of our street, so I figured I’d get home eventually as long as I stayed on the right-of-way.
But I was open to alternatives.
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PITCHING MATCHUPS
Friday August 27, 2010
Game Time: 6:10 p.m. CDT
Television: FSH
Promotion: None.
Matchup: Houston – Nelson Figueroa (1-0, 2.42) Bishop of Naples and a vocal opponent of Arianism and Pelagianism.
New York – Mike Pelfrey (12-7, 3.80) The name Michael signifies “Who is like to God?” and is the war cry of the good angels in the battle being fought in Heaven against Satan and his followers
Saturday August 28, 2010
Game Time: 6:10 p.m. CDT
Television: My20
Promotion: None. Nada.
Matchup: Houston –Brett Myers (9-7, 3.08) There was a young man from Stamboul/Who soliloquized thus to his tool/”You took all my wealth/And you ruined my health/And now you won’t pee, you old fool.”
New York – Johan Santana (10-8, 2.94) My name is Yon Yohnson/I work in Wisconsin/I work in a lumbermill there/The people I meet when I walk down the street/They say, “What’s your name?”/And I say “My name is Yon Yohnson/I work in Wisconsin . . .”
Sunday August 29, 2010
Game Time: 12:10 p.m. CDT
Television: FSH
Promotion: Some Mets teddy bear or something.
Houston – Bud Norris (6-7, 5.03) Norris entregou seu terceiro começo reto da qualidade prendendo o Phillies a cinco batidas e um funcionado em seis vezes terça-feira. Ele didn’ t começ uma decisão mas é 5-0 com uma ERA 3.03 em seus seis começos passados. He’ s 4-2 com uma ERA 3.91 desde a vinda fora o DL.
New York – R.A. Dickey (8-5, 3.64) Um local three-run em o que o juntamento chamasse um knuckleball terrível transformou um começo da qualidade em uma nenhum-decisão última terça-feira em Citi. Mas Dickey’ o inimigo seguinte de s é o Astros, uma equipe que prendeu a dois funciona sobre 8 1/3 das vezes mais adiantadas este mês em Houston.
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SALLY CAN’T DANCE. “So, how does it feel, being in a wheelchair?”
“What?”
“How does it feel – you know – to be stuck in that thing, like, forever?”
The young reporter was nervous, and cleared his throat. His retarded editor had sent him out to do a retarded story of human interest, to find one of the handicapped students at his school and ask them retarded questions like, you know, how does it feel to be in a wheelchair? The reporter felt uncomfortable and, as Jennifer Aniston might say, a bit like a re-tard for even asking.
That young reporter was me, by the way, working earnestly for my high school newspaper, Populi Verbum. I had taken Journalism I my junior year on a whim. I needed an elective to fill out my schedule, and I’d already taken Home Ec (twice) and Bachelor Living and the blow-off classes like that, and my girlfriend wanted to take Journalism, so I did, too.
It worked out pretty well, actually. Normally the J-I students stayed out of the way when the paper was being readied for a printing (usually every third week or so), while the Journalism II and III students did all the heavy lifting. We were supposed to watch, and learn. But they were short on upper level students that year, and many of the ones they had were, well, retarded. So was the editor, a big girl with glasses who thought a gripping opinion piece might focus on the pros and cons of students picking up after themselves in the cafeteria. They’d had a music column the year before, and a pretty good one, but the guy who wrote it had graduated. Since I was the only one in any of the classes who exhibited a broad knowledge of the current popular music and was willing to do it, I got the music column gig. Quite a big deal, I thought, though the J-II and III students looked down on it, because it wasn’t “real” reporting.
That is how I ended up out in the field asking dumb and offensive question to students with MS and ALS and such. The editor thought that even though my music column was popular with the readers, I needed to get out and get some “real” reporting experience. Right. I ended up not completing that assignment, and figured I’d lose my column to boot, but fuck her, I wasn’t asking any more questions like that. Anyway, as it happened I got to keep the column – usually two or three short reviews of current LP releases – and no one ever asked me to do any “real” reporting again. Sweet.
The other nice thing about that class was I was the oldest student in it, and one of only two guys. The rest were 14- and 15-year-old sophomore girls, a lot of them attractive 14- and 15-year-old sophomore girls. Of course I couldn’t do anything about that, since my girlfriend was in there with me. She was a 14- and 15-year-old sophomore girl, too, and was friends with a lot of the other girls in that class, so they were usually hanging around her and/or my desk (it was a pretty informal atmosphere.) Truth is, I kind of ended up running that class.
One girl I really liked – as a friend now – was named Susan. She was one of my girlfriend’s friends, and sort of pretty. Yellow hair and a nice smile, in some ways just another slim teen-aged babe in your standard 1970s attire. What I really liked about Susan was she had an attitude. This 95-lb. girl would get right up in the face of anyone who was fucking with her. No fear. I liked that.
My girlfriend knew something was up right away, of course, and she got on my ass about it. But I swore this girl Susan was just a friend, which she was, and eventually that other died down. We had a lot of fun in that class. The teacher was only a few years older than us and pretty inexperienced, and she was happy to let us do what we wanted, as long as it didn’t get her in any real trouble.
One time we were helping put together the paper for the press run. Back then, before computers in the classroom, we had to cut out copies of the stories run off on a mimeograph machine and stick them to these boards the actual size of the newspaper pages. The boards had wax lines on them, and we’d stick the stories to the wax, mixing and matching and moving things around the board until it all fit.
A few of us stayed late to finish, because the boards had to be at the printers by 11:00 that evening, or something like that. By the time we were done it was 8:00 p.m. Susan said she needed a ride, so she and my girlfriend and I got in my Skylark and I drove us home. I dropped my girlfriend off first because she lived on the other side of the West End, and her mom was already pissed that we’d stayed as late as we did. I kissed her good night and then Susan slid into my front seat and I headed for her house, only a few streets over from mine.
It was the first time I’d had any kind of conversation with her outside of school, with no one else butting in. I asked her some things about her family – I thought I knew one of her brothers – but the whole situation was kind of awkward, and I don’t really know why. Susan was pretty talkative – and sarcastic-funny – in class, but now she was quiet and kind of timid, and I saw her in a different way than I had before. Without the up front brashness to cover up, she was a pretty scared little girl; and it made me feel like protecting her and doing whatever I could to make everything all right for her.
And, of course, I couldn’t do that. I had a girlfriend who I was really happy with already (I’ll have to tell you about her sometime), and there was no way I could pull off the guardian angel thing with Susan platonically, that I knew of. I’d end up falling for her if she didn’t fall for me first, and either way that would have been nothing but trouble.
I don’t think Susan and I were ever as close again as we were that night after I dropped my girlfriend off, the night we sat in her driveway for 15 minutes and said maybe ten words between us, just sitting there in sweet silence. Nothing physical happened – like I said, we hardly even spoke – but I would not have wanted to be anywhere else on the planet that night for those fifteen minutes. I felt like time had slowed down and I had been given the gift of Vision, if only for a few minutes . . the vision to see, to know what everything about everything meant, to see every blip and planet and star on that starry night and know each one and understand the arrangement of it all, including the arrangement of me and this pretty, skinny blonde girl alone together in my car on this odd and random night. She was a friend of mine, but my feelings for her had been changed. I never even touched her, but after that night I thought of her often, though usually from afar. All through high school and after, long after. Way past the time when the girlfriend I valued so much then was long, long gone. When the night was clear and cold, especially, I would think of her. I would think I could smell the smoke from her cigarette, and see her golden hair blowing lightly in the breeze, and hear her next to me, being quiet. One thing she had told me once was that she really liked my hair, it was ‘cool’ . . . what it was, was pretty damn long, and that was a problem, because ever since then I have worn my hair longer than I should have, all the way up to now. Because of what Susan said once, if you want to know the truth, in that wonderful, offhand way she said things.
I’d been sitting in the recliner in my living room staring at the ceiling for hours when my wife came in. It was a Saturday, and she’d been out shopping with her friends. We’d been married only a couple of years then, and did most things happily together, but both of us understood that sometimes it was good for her to go shopping or something with her friends, and for me to drink a few cold ones with mine or, as it happened, to sit alone for awhile in the living room, thinking about things from long ago.
That day I’d got a phone call from a guy I used to hang out with some back in the high school days. I hadn’t heard from him in years. His name was Sam, and he had always talked like a ‘50s hipster/beatnik for some reason. It wasn’t an affectation as far as I could tell, it was just the way he talked. He reminded me of Sugar Bear – he sounded like him, and kind of looked like him, too – and in fact I used to call him ‘Sugar Bear’ sometimes, back in the old days. Anyway, Sug Sam called to tell me that my old friend Susan had died the night before, they thought from an overdose of prescription drugs. She was 27 years old, twice divorced, and had two young children. And was still pretty, Sam said. But he said all the old fiestiness had long gone out of her. She’d been through two rough marriages. One guy ended up doing a 10-year stretch in Huntsville, and the other (a guy I knew) was a fucking loser, and left her much worse for the wear. Some of this I had known, but not all of it.
Sam said for the last few years, after her second marriage broke up, Susan had just been kind of lost, and no one had been able to get through to her, or get her to talk about what hurt her so much, or to ease her pain in any significant way. She was always an experimenter when it came to controlled substances, a self-medicator. And one night she just medicated herself too much, I guess.
And upon hearing it I remember being sort of overwhelmed for a few minutes by that same feeling I’d had one night so many years before, the feeling of wanting to protect this sweet girl, and to make her smile and be happy. When that feeling passed, I was left kind of disoriented, split between the present and the time before, when things were breezy and easy and nothing mattered all that much, and I could look across a schoolroom desk at a skinny little blue-eyed, yellow-haired girl, and I could say something retarded that made those eyes of hers light up, maybe made her laugh out loud. From down deep, where all the joy comes from.
And then I let go, and was fully back in the present. I pushed the footrest of the recliner in with my legs, and got up to go help my wife carry things in from her car. It was already fall, and when I walked outside I noticed the coolness in the air. It was going to start getting cold pretty soon, it wouldn’t be long now.
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INJURIES
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SOME KIND OF VENTILATOR. I’d been walking down the right-of-way for awhile, and had crossed a few residential streets, when I came to the intersection of a major thoroughfare, to a full-blown railroad crossing. I decided I was tired of walking down the tracks, so I turned west down the avenue, and trudged on as the traffic whizzed by. It was well past mid-morning now, my game was probably already over. It was getting really hot, and I still had another twenty minutes or so of walking before I’d be home.
I’d been going down the road a little way when an orange and white El Camino passed me up and then pulled up to the curb, up ahead of me. It was a friend of mine named Jerry, a senior who was actually a friend of my brother’s, but who had taken a liking to me, in a sort of big-brotherly way. This was important to me at the time, because Jerry was cool. He wore a floppy suede hat everywhere, and a puca-shell necklace, and he kind of looked like Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider. And he drove that fine El Camino. It was a major coup for me when Jerry started coming to pick me up to ride around and smoke weed with him in that cool-ass car, listening to Frank Zappa or Kevin Ayers or something else equally weird. My peers thought this was definitely an imprimatur of coolness, and looked up to me after that.
This morning Jerry had been riding around looking for something to do, and the unlikely prospect of coming up on me walking down Calder Avenue in my baseball uniform was as much of a pleasant surprise for him as it was for me to have him come find me and save me from the rest of the walk home.
Did I want to go straight home? Jerry asked me. No. Hell, no. Not only would I have to deal with my mother wanting to know what it was I had done to get myself kicked out of the game, by now my father was probably home, too. He wouldn’t have said anything to me. In fact, he would have ignored me utterly, for that day and the rest of the weekend. To tell the truth, sometimes that stung as much as being told to get the fuck out of the dugout.
So Jerry reached across into the glove box and pulled out a fat baggie full of gold colored straw. Sensimilla. Jerry always had the best weed. There were two pink-colored cigarettes at the top of the lid, already rolled, and when we got to a stoplight, Jerry pulled one of the smokes out and lit it with his ever present Zippo. He took a deep drag, and then as he pulled away from the light, he handed it over to me. I did the same, and so it went for awhile. We rode around the West End listening to UFO, I think it was. I’m not really sure, because by about halfway through the second joint, I was literally in my own little world. Being that wasted was always interesting, and different. It made almost any music sound good, for one thing. That day UFO, a second-rate 1970s hard rock band that featured once and future Scorpions guitarist Michael Schenker, sounded fucking awesome to me. But honestly, I really didn’t like being that fucked up. When I got too high, there was always some part of me that was fighting to get back to normal. I could never could quite completely enjoy the buzz. I didn’t tell anybody about that, though. Wouldn’t have been cool.
Anyway, we rode around like that for awhile. I did not really want to go home. I knew I probably should, though. Smoking weed always made me lose track of time, but even so I knew by now my parents would really be wondering where in the hell I was. I was thinking of telling Jerry to just drop me off at the house when he looked over and asked me if I wanted to try a little “toot.” Cocaine. It was a question I’d been dreading.
I knew Jerry did coke. He was one of a small number of kids we knew who did it. It gave them a special status. But I was secretly afraid of it. I had a comfort zone when it came to getting fucked up. I could deal with any type of alcohol. Weed I could deal with, but I really didn’t like the high a lot of the time. I smoked it because everyone else did, but I quit doing it pretty early on. I had a real affinity for prescription drugs, because they were easy to get (from our parents) and strictly measured, like alcohol. You knew what you were getting, pretty much. The stuff beyond that scared me a lot, though, and thank goodness for that.
That day in Jerry’s car, I had to go against everything I believed in at the time, everything I’d been working toward for so long. I wanted more than anything to be cool, to fit in. But I just couldn’t do the coke, man. At the risk of blowing my insider cool status forever, I turned Jerry down on his offer. “OK, that’s cool, man,” he said. “I’ll go ahead and take you home.”
I don’t know whether Jerry was just trying to get rid of me after I wouldn’t do the coke with him, or if he had some flash of insight or understanding or maybe even empathy for me. I do know he never told anyone about this episode, I would have known if he had. So my ‘cool’ status was secure. It was a few years later that I realized how stupid it was to try so hard to be cool. For one thing, I found out I was already cool, I didn’t have to try to be. I’m only halfway joking. What I found was that when I quit trying to be someone else or live up to someone else’s expectations, when I was just myself, people liked me and thought I was cool and wanted to be around me and be like me. It works this way for most people, I’m sure; but who would have thought? It is one of those unexplainable quirks of nature that practically every kid has to go through a stage of trying to be ‘cool’ in some way, of being something other than what he or she is. Unfortunately, some never get past it, or get sucked under before they can figure it all out. I am just lucky I did not. I did not know it then, or even for a long while after, but that day in Jerry’s El Camino I was at a crossroads. I could have gone either way, and had I decided to rush in blindly against my instinct, on into the unknown, well . . . who knows what would have happened? I could have got through it all right, anyway. Or not.
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I was sitting alone on my deck out back. It was dark, and starting to get a little cool, actually. Still, I stayed out there, because I needed to think about some things. I could hear my family in the house, and it made me feel warm inside. I wanted to go join them, and I would soon. But first, I needed to take care of something going on in my head. I’d had a sort of revelation that day, an epiphany, almost. I’d been trying to put the finishing touches on a submission I had due when I realized that after years of trying to figure everything out on my own, and not being able to, suddenly I had got it, or part of it, anyway. I always knew there had to be some kind of arc to my fucked up life, but I never could see it, it was always obscure to me. I started writing these Series Previews that are supposed to be about the Astros upcoming series but hardly ever are. What I have been doing with them, unknowingly until now . . . I’ve always had my other life going on, while at the same time I’ve had my baseball life going on. My life as a fan, and then a player, and then as a fan again. Always running parallel to my other life, the one of chasing women and getting fucked up and endless disappointments and having people die on me. But for some reason, I never thought of one in tandem with the other.
And, I still don’t. But what I have done, I realize now, in these self-indulgent Previews that SnS has been so kind in letting me inflict on everyone else, is to look at my other life through the prism of my baseball life, including my long life as a fan of the Astros. I don’t think I would ever have thought to do this on my own.
But, strangely, the reflection of my life off of my baseball life has given me just the right amount of deflection or refraction or whatever, and now the other life, the one that has been obscure to me, the one that always seemed like someone else had lived it, not me . . . now that life has taken on some meaning and clarity, and I have been able to discern a pattern to it, sort of. I can see a sort of arc to it now. Which is a great benefit to me, I think, although it is to no one else, I’m sure.
I still don’t know why I was put here, or who sent me, exactly. I’ve long ago forgot what my instructions were, if I ever knew. I feel just right, though; like I am becoming self-actualized or something. God loves me, and apparently Abraham Maslow does, too. As did this golden-haired girl, who was as tough as they come but really wasn’t. Who thought my hair was cool, who loved me like I loved her, with her mind, from afar. And who loves me still, I can literally feel it, from wherever she is out there.
I love baseball, man, and the Astros. And I love my children, and my wife. I love my life. And I love a lot of other things out there, things that are harder to explain.
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Houston wins the series, 2-1.
Listen as she speaks to you
Hear the voices flutter through
The barriers arranged by youClose the shutters draw the shades
Filter out the everglades
Glistening with evening dewThunder calls through waterfalls
Rising tides and ocean walls
I can hear you when you sighListen as she speaks to you
Hear the voices flutter through
Watch them fall and let them lieI can hear you when you sigh
Through the water in the sky
If you ignore the Pirates, and why wouldn’t you as they have been