My 30-year high school reunion is coming up this summer, but I’m not going. I was deliriously happy to get out of Lubbock after my senior year in 1980, and I’m still happy about it, so I don’t really see any reason to go back.

And since this is mid-May, it’s also the 30th anniversary of my crowning athletic achievement. Now it’s not much compared to the accomplishments of some of the other folks here on SpikesnStars, but we weren’t all destined for greatness I guess.

See, I’ve never been an athlete. I had double pneumonia when I was 6, and had asthma attacks and bronchitis every year in school. Plus, the one thing in the world that I’m most allergic to is cottonseed. And I grew up in Lubbock, where the cotton gins grind that shit up and spew it in the air. Throw in the spring dirt storms, and my lungs were tied in knots.

So I loved sports but didn’t have the endurance for real competition. But there was one thing I could do. I was tall and skinny (this was a long time ago, remember) and I could run like the wind … for about 100 yards. I could make one blazing burst of speed, but then I was gassed.

Anyway, May 1980. I’m about three weeks from graduating and getting the hell out of this school. Hallelujah. It was also the time of year when teachers had run out of ideas and were just mailing it in, trying to come up with shit for us to do to finish the year. Especially in PE class. For some reason, all the athletic kids on the official school teams had been dumped back into our PE class to finish out the year, so we had some members of the track team and other sports. The coaches decided the way to end the year was to split the class into two huge teams and have a track meet with all the events. Since we only had an hour of class time each day, this track meet would kill the last two or three weeks of school and everyone could loaf around, except during their events.

Well, what a surprise, all the track team members and other athletes got put on the same team, and the rest of us asthmatic nerds were put on the Washington Generals team. See, this way, the athletes got one more chance to break school records, or something. I was never sure about the details.

But our team of misfits actually turned out to be pretty good. The biggest, shyest girl in school turned out to be a star shot-putter. We won some other events and were hanging tight with the rich-boy athletes, and then it came time for my first event – the 880 relay. Now like I’ve said, I could burn up the track for about 100 yards, but my 220-yard leg in this relay was really pushing it.

The other team wasn’t completely made up of the school’s track regulars, but I think there were at least a couple of them. I was running the second leg, against this smart-ass punk who was fast, but not as fast as I was. I figured I could take him at the beginning, but was worried I might not hold him off when I ran out of gas. And I had no doubt that I would run out of gas.

Well the race started and by the time the baton was coming to me, my team was already behind by 10 or 15 yards. I took the baton cleanly and put my sights on the punk’s ass in the next lane. I noticed that he had really shitty running form, with his arms and baton all flailing around and shit … and then I was past him. I blew past that fucker before I even got up to full speed, and I started motoring into the turn.

And then I poured it on. I was rocking in the Driver’s Seat and no one was going to catch me.

(I know that song is from 1978, but I didn’t hear it until 1980; this was Lubbock, remember.) I would have rocked Foghat’s Drivin’ Wheel too, but there was no time because I was burning around the track and not slowing down. Man, I was cooking with gas. My weak-ass lungs felt like they were going to burst, but I didn’t slow down. It was the hardest I’ve ever run in my entire life. I finally made another clean hand-off, then staggered to the side and gasped for breath.

The coaches and other students were all staring at me in amazement, and I looked back and saw my punk-ass competition still staggering toward us way back down the track. I watched the rest of the race, and the rich boys gained on us steadily through the final two legs, but in the end we won because of the lead I’d built.

But while I was standing there basking in victory, I also knew I’d pushed it too hard. The air was full of pollen and cottonseed, there was a dirt storm on the horizon, and I’d badly overexerted myself. By the next day, the sky was brown with dirt and my lungs were brown with phlegm. Lubbock Lungbutter.

My trackstar days were over. Or so I thought.

Read the second part of the story, “How I Set the School Hurdles Record With My Balls,” after the Astros-Dodgers preview.

***********

Astros at Dodgers

Dodger Stadium

Monday, May 17, 9:10 p.m. CDT – FSH-HD
Tuesday, May 18, 9:10 p.m. CDT – FSH-HD

More late-night West Coast games. Kind of tough to stay up late just to watch the kind of slap-dickery we’ve been seeing, but I’ll probably watch anyway.

Notable giveaways

Tuesday – An Andre Ethier bobblehead; note how both his hands are gripping the bat from the top. No wonder he broke his pinky finger in batting practice. It’s going to suck for him if he has to miss his own bobblehead day, with a bobblehead that shows how not to grip a bat.

Projected Matchups from Astros.com

Monday
Wandy Rodriguez (2-4, 4.81)  v. John Ely (1-1, 3.86)

Wandy beat the Shitbirds in his last start, but he still doesn’t have a quality start this month. He’s 3-2 against the Dodgers with a 2.70 ERA. Russell Martin is the only Dodger with a homer off Wandy, though Ronnie Belliard and Dreamboat Manny have hit him well. In 14 AB’s against Wandy, Reed Johnson has five strikeouts and only two hits.

John Ely is not to be confused with Joe Ely, who also got the fuck out of Lubbock like I did. John Ely is a rookie making his fourth start. He lost to the fucking Mets in his first outing, but beat the Snakes last week. He’s never faced the Astros.

Tuesday
TBA v. Hiroki Kuroda (4-1, 2.66)

Well I don’t know who’s pitching for the Astros tonight, but since Chris Sampson went to Tech and had to live in Lubbock for a while too, I’ll just use his stats. He’ll probably get into the game tonight anyway.

James Loney is 3-for-5 against Sampson with two doubles, and Belliard has a homer off him. Ethier, Kemp, and Martin are a combined 3-for-18 against him.

The Dodgers are 6-1 in Kuroda’s starts this year. In three starts against the Astros, he’s gone 1-0 with an ERA under 2. Nobody on the Astros has done much against him. Geoff Blum has a homer, but it was his only hit in 5 at-bats against Kuroda. Hunter Pence and Carlos Lee are both 2-for-8 against him, and it gets worse from there.

Injury Report

Houston – Tim Byrdak is out until late this month with a strained hamstring.

Los Angeles – Andre Ethier has that busted pinky and may or may not make this series. Brad Ausmus is on the 60-day DL after having back surgery. Pitchers Vicente Padilla, Cory Wade, and Charlie Haeger are all out and will miss this series, but Rafael Furcal might be back.

Discuss tonight’s game in the Gamezone.

***************

So anyway, Lubbock 1980. As usual, I missed a week of school with bronchitis. It happened twice every school year, so it was a fitting end to my senior year.

When I got back to PE class, I was amazed to learn that the stupid track meet was still going. They’d missed several days because of the dirt storm, duh, and were hustling to try to finish up. Well, fuck it, I’d already run my event, plus I’d just spent a week with bronchitis and was still on antibiotics and I was weak as shit. I didn’t even bother putting on a gym suit, mainly because they’d been bugging us to clear out our lockers and take all our smelly shit home anyway, so I had.

But they said we had to finish the dumbass track meet because it was part of our final grade, so I just wore my jeans and PE shirt and went to the far end of the track where hopefully they wouldn’t notice me.

“Craig! Get over here, you’re running the hurdles!” Oh shit, one of the coaches found me.

“What? I’ve been sick; I can’t run! Plus I’ve never jumped a hurdle in my life!”

“Well hurry up and practice at it, you’ve got 10 minutes! And you can’t hurdle in those jeans. Go get a pair of shorts out my office.”

Great, not only do I have to run the stupid hurdles, but I have to wear the ratty-ass shorts someone else left behind. The only shorts I could find were a little too small for me, but I put them on and went back out to practice.

I pissed and moaned, but no one was around because they were all watching some other race, so I lined up at the hurdles to practice. I dashed toward the hurdles and stretched out in my first leap, and both of my balls popped out one of the legs of my shorts. (This was 1980, so guys’ shorts were pretty skimpy compared to the jodhpurs that pass for shorts today.)

I suddenly remembered why our coaches had insisted we wear jockstraps in PE class. (“Look, we’ve got girls in this class, and I don’t want any of you guys to do a squat-thrust and have your balls touch the floor!”) But my jockstrap was at home, and the race was here and now.

I veered off to the side, tucked my junk back into my shorts, and readjusted my tighty whities. Nope, they weren’t going to hold anything in place. And just like that, the coaches were heading my way and it was race time.

Then I realized who my opponent was going to be. It was John Elway, the school’s top track star. (It wasn’t really THE John Elway, but it was this snotty-ass rich-boy who looked just like Elway – perfect blond hair, all tanned and muscled, and with a condescending toothy smirk.) I also realized this was his last chance to break the school record, even though I was pretty sure he already owned it.

It was a really windy day (Lubbock, remember), but the wind was blowing hard across the track, not from behind or in front of us. The gun went off, I stretched out for the first hurdle, and sure enough, my nuts came out again. But I didn’t veer off the track this time, no sir! I was already headed for the next hurdle and I knew I had to clear it not only with my legs, but my sack as well. So that put a spring in my step.

Going over the second hurdle with my nuts in the wind, I had an epiphany – I realized there’s a rhythm to running the hurdles. So I got into the rhythm of the race and gave each jump a little extra bounce, because of … you know.

I don’t even know the length of the race or the height of the hurdles, but my balls never even grazed a gate. Untouched all the way to the endzone! I was concentrating so hard that as I cleared the last hurdle, and sprinted across the finish, I realized John Elway was BEHIND ME. HOLY SHIT HE WAS BEHIND ME.

I tucked in my stuff (I don’t think anyone even noticed it flapping around) and trotted back to the coaches with the stopwatches. The one who was timing me muttered in astonishment, “School record.” The other coach, timing the track star, said “Both of them. They both broke the school record.” (I thought to myself, “Yeah, you mean both my BALLS broke the school record.”)

And then the head coach looked at his track star who looked like John Elway, and he looked at the brown Lubbock sky, and said the words that ended my budding athletic career:

“Wind-aided. Doesn’t count.”

Aw fuck. My one shot at history, and it was tainted because it got windy in Lubbock. That fucking figures. But I know where the record really resides. In my pants.

So anyway I don’t think I’ll be going to the 30-year reunion. But I will stand on my front porch and wave my balls in the direction of West Texas.

Lubbock or Leave it, indeed.

SEASONS IN HELL, VOL. II, NO. 2

May 14-16, 2010

Astros (13-21) vs. Giants (18-15)

AT & T Park
24 Willie Mays Plaza
San Francisco, CA 94107

**********

The 2010 Astros ended their latest abysmal stretch (1-12 from April 27 to May 9) by sweeping the Cardinals in St. Louis this week, which is pretty funny.  The BFiBs, who’d been cruising along in first place along with their team until the Sad Sacks hit town, are probably now having a little doubt enter the picture.  Wonderful.  Remember, the Astros ended their season-opening 1-8 skid by going to Chicago and taking 2-of-3 from the FTCubbies in front of the home folks.  If this is going to be as bad a season as I supect, beating up on the FTCubs and Co-ardinals semi-regularly is some consolation.  Probably just God’s way of keeping some over-obsessive fans from jumping off the Loop 610 ship channel bridge.

Anyway, God loves me.  I know this, for one thing, because every once in awhile he gets really pissed off at my antics, and starts throwing his weight around in my direction.  If he didn’t care, he wouldn’t bother, right?  But I’ll get to that.

I know I’ve said it here more than a few times, but the fact the Astros are bad this year does not change my allegiance or how I feel about them.  I’ve said this so much, especially recently, I think maybe the other me has said it here a few times, too.  The other me.  My ghost twin, my spiritual wraith.  The guy who walks around looking like me and sounding like me but isn’t me, exactly.  My doppelgänger, I mean.

I’ve only ever seen my doppelgänger once.  I’ve come across evidence of him many times; people will tell me I did something at a party or in a bar somewhere, and I can’t remember doing it at all, or even being at the party or in the bar they speak of.  Then I’ll remember You Know Who.

My suspicions were confirmed one night when a bunch of us were staying up at our place in Tyler Co., in the Big Thicket.  I decided to walk down and close the front gate for the night, around 9:00 p.m. or so.  The walk to the gate is roughly a quarter mile.  Most of it is through open pasture, but the last 100 yards or so is down a driveway through thick woods that shield our house and outbuildings from vision, and buffer sound from the farm road that runs in front of our place.  A half moon was out, and the night was clear.  I had a flashlight with me, for going through the woods, but my eyes had adjusted and I was walking through the pasture without it.  I kept sensing something was following me or watching me, and I stopped three or four times to watch and listen, but I did not see or hear anything.  I finally decided it was the stopping that was messing things up, so the next time I felt like something was there, I kept walking, but swiveled my head around.

And that’s when I saw myself.  It was me, exactly, walking along beside myself across that pasture, maybe ten feet apart.  There I was.  Wow! Same gait and everything, left hand shoved into the top of the jeans pocket,shoulder-length hair swinging back and forth with each step.  It was uncanny.  I looked myself in the eye, and some sort of silent communication passed between me.  The Germans, who came up with the concept of  it, felt it was extremely bad luck to see one’s doppelgänger, it supposedly foretold much trouble, even death.  But seeing me walking along beside myself that night gave me a strange feeling of comfort.  Of ease.  It was good to know there was another me out there, with another agenda entirely, but with my best interests at heart.  I was thinking about this when I realized the apparition was gone, and so I went on down and closed the gate and then trudged slowly back up to the house.

I should say by way of disclosure I’d been drinking some that day and night, plus one of my acquaintances had just introduced me to the wonderfulness of Seconal.  So there is that.  That stuff didn’t normally make me hallucinate, though, and my vision that night seemed very real.  I laugh out loud at all paranormal jibber-jabber, ancient aliens and shit like that; the existence of my doppelgänger is the one exception.  And my doppelgänger thinks the Astros suck this season, big time.  But he is still an Astros fan, through and through.  He has said as much here, several times.

(excerpted from Me And My Doppelgänger, by F. Bestertester)

We’ve met a lot of great men who weren’t so great
We’ve met modern day saviors who couldn’t even stop the rain
We’ve heard the word of God from a surface-to-air missle
And felt the hand of Allah from a hijacked plane

We’ve seen the fire in the sky in the morning light
We’ve seen the buildings tumble into the maw of the city
And when the dust cleared and there was nothing left
We saw the sun setting down on the horizon so pretty

Me and my doppelgänger, we think alike, you know
Wherever I wander, that’s where he goes
We don’t take no crap, we don’t pay no mind
We just thank sweet Jesus for the sweet sunshine.

**********

PITCHING MATCHUPS

Friday May 14, 2010
Game Time: 9:15 p.m. CDT
Television: FSH
Promotion: None
Matchup:  Houston – Felipé Paulino (0-5, 4.67)  ‘Bad Luck’ Paulino, although he brings some of it on himself.  The Big Dominican seems close at times to breaking through, but perhaps he never will.
San Francisco – Todd Wellmeyer (1-3, 5.97)  Suck-ass former FTCub.  The polar opposite of Lincecum and Cain.  How the hell is he in this rotation?

Saturday May 15, 2010
Game Time: 3:10 p.m. CDT
Television: FOX
Promotion: None
Matchup:  Houston – Roy Oswalt (2-4, 2.63)  Roy has pitched great this season.  He doesn’t have much to show for it, but then, he’s on a shitty team.
San Francisco – Tim Lincecum (4-0, 1.86)  What can one say?  Steven Strasberg, Schmeven Schmassberg. . . Lincecum is the best pitcher in baseball, until someone comes up and proves otherwise.

Sunday May 16, 2010
Game Time: 3:05 p.m. CDT
Television: FSH
Promotion: Giants Rally Scarf — I don’t know, I thought the days of blankets and parkas at Giants games ended when they moved out of Candlestick all those years ago.  But if you live in S.F., and you want to wear a woolen scarf to a baseball game, who am I to say different?
Matchup:  Houston – Brett Myers (2-2, 3.52)  Myers has been a nice surprise to this point, he has given the Astros some innings and has been reliable.
San Francisco – Barry Zito (5-1, 1.90)  Looks like Zito is all the way back from whatever was afflicting him the last three seasons.  He had a bit of a setback in his last start, walking seven Padres in five innings and picking up his first loss of the season.  He’s already beaten the Astros this year, pitching six shutout innings the first week of the season.

**********

Like any Astros fan over 25 years old, I’ve known plenty of ‘off’ years.  The Astros lost some, and then lost a lot.  But it always seemed a benign kind of losing.  The team often seemed just this far from turning some corner, and improving markedly.  Hope, justified or not, will sustain a fan, for a long, long time.

But this year seems different.  This year the losing is often jarring.  Most nights, the team has no hope.  The offense is so abysmal, once they give up two or three runs, a bad feeling begins to set in.  But I think what really scares me is not what will happen this year – the team may not win 60 games – but rather, what comes after that.  It remains to be seen what will transpire the rest of this season, but if there ever was a time to dump veterans and salary and start the rebuilding process in earnest, this is it.  If nothing like that takes place this season, well, when will it?  Ever?

I know the Astros are a really bad team this year.  I think a lot of us suspected they would be before the season even began.  But this bad?  This horrifyingly, scarifyingly bad?  These soul-destroying eight- and nine-game losing streaks, seeming to come as regularly as plagues now?  Are winning two-of-their-last-thirteen streaks what we are in for all this season long?  I shudder to think about it, and it keeps me from sleeping most nights.  And when I do. . .

I had a dream last week that fucked with my mind entirely, and left a deep psychic scar that I suspect will never really heal.  Oh, it’ll scab over eventually, but instead of leaving behind a smooth surface afterward, I’ll instead be left with a large, ugly cicatrix on the heart of my soul.  Until the end of time.  For – fucking – ever.

In my dream, God sent an angel down to find me.  The poor bastard who got the assignment had to look for awhile.   My wife had no idea where I was, she rarely does; and I wasn’t anywhere the angel – let’s call him Nate – surmised I might be.  Nate looked everywhere and finally, around midnight, he found me commiserating in a little bar off of Concord in the north end, called Quan’s.  Just a slip of a bar, but dark and well-patronized; it is surrounded by an large, empty lot, on one of the busier streets in that part of town.  The owner of Quan’s is a guy I used to run around with some, back in the old days.  He works for the city now, and he got a good deal on the building his bar is in, and the land; to be honest, I think he had some insider information on it being foreclosed on or whatever you call it when the city puts a lien on your property because you owe them money for mowing your lot because you wouldn’t mow it yourself and the grass and weeds eventually got so high someone with some pull decided it was an eyesore or worse and sent out a city crew to take care of the job and then sent you the bill.  Only you didn’t pay it because you didn’t take it seriously or you couldn’t afford it or you were so into this Vietnamese chick you met at Cinco’s a few weeks ago that you’ve been letting all your business slip.  So now the city is eyeballing your property, and you decide, fuck it, it’s just a dumpy little building on a weedy lot in one of the less desirable parts of town, it was a pain in the ass to keep up anyway, ever since the wife’s uncle died and left it to you.  They can fucking have it.  Then you drive by a month or two later and see the lot looking all neat and trimmed, and the building you used to store your extra shit in all spruced up and repainted, with new burglar bars all around.  “Monday Night Football, Free pool and set ups all week” the marquee sign out front says.  “Goddamn.  They turned my storage shed into a fucking bar.”

My buddy had just slid another bourbon across to me when this angel, Nate, put his hand, or wing, whatever, on my shoulder.  It startled me.  “What the f—“, I half spun around, forming a fist with my right hand, which had been resting in the pocket of the light jacket I was wearing.  I grabbed my keys, which were in the pocket, too, and had several of the longer ones sticking out of the slots between my fingers.  A cop showed me that once.  We were coming out of a bar on a dark street in Salt Lake City, when three seedy looking fuckers started walking toward us.  My friend, who was in plain clothes and unarmed (we were at a convention), told me to grab my keys and arrange them in my fist.  He said a punch from something like that can really fuck a person up, at least buying you enough time to get away relatively unscathed.  I never forgot it.

So, anyway, I spun on this Nate character, ready to deck him with my house keys and then hightail it the fuck out of there (by some socio-economic criteria, I was vastly outnumbered in that bar.)  But, something stopped me.  It was my keys, getting caught in the fabric of my pocket.  That was just enough time for the angel to pin my arm with his other, um, wing, precluding me from punching the heavenly messenger right between the eyes.

“What?”  “What the fuck do you want?” I shouted.   He just smiled, and then cleaved me to him; and the next thing I knew, we were flying over the city, at night, maybe 75 feet up, and this guy Nate was busy pointing out places where I’d committed one atrocity or another over the years.

You know, when you live somewhere long enough, you start losing your geographic perspective of the place.  Certain locations or parts of town begin to lose geographic meaning, as they take on more symbolic overtones.  It was weird to realize, flying around that night with Nate, that this whole vast life I imagined I’d lived over the last thirty years or so, the wide swath I always fancied I’d cut, all of it mostly took place in a roughly 10 to 12 square block area, in a gritty refinery town in southeastern-most Texas.

As the messenger from God was methodically reading off to me the litany of sins, major and minor, I’d committed over the years, I’m afraid my extreme general disinterest in that subject betrayed itself, and I yawned.  This really pissed Nate off.  He threw down the tablet or PDA or whatever it was he was reading from and said, “Look.  Is this a big fucking joke to you?  Do you think you can just do whatever the fuck you want for years and years and suffer no consequences?”  I quietly pointed out to him that this was pretty much what I had been doing over the last many years, so why wouldn’t I think that?

He was still pretty agitated.  “Well, we’re gonna fix your little red wagon, fucker!  We’re gonna make your favorite team SUCK!”  Nate went on to inform me that, except for a blanket condemnation of the Cubs and their nitwit fans leveled many years ago, mostly on general principles, God did not normally make it a habit to curse sports teams.  But I had been so wanton and gleeful in committing my transgressions over the years, and so blithe in mostly dodging the consequences, that special measures were being taken.  The Astros are totally fucked for 2010, Nate said, and nothing Drayton or Pam or Ed Wade or any other mortal did can change that.  “This is the Word of the Lord,” Nate said.  He looked at me, as if waiting for a response, but I just shrugged my shoulders and flipped the hair back out of my eyes.  All I could think about was the Astros are fucking terrible, down by law, by a decree straight from heaven.

And apparently, it is all my fault.

I want to sincerely apologize to everyone here and not here for this.  Really, had I known the consequences I might’ve done some things differently.  Maybe.  I asked the angel about the years beyond this one.  “It depends,” he said sagely.  “On what?  On whether I clean up my act?”  “Oh, that, sure; but also on whether the kids down in Corpus Christi and Lexington and Lancaster develop quickly enough.”  I thought about that for a moment, and then I looked back up.  He was gone.

I was left standing in the dark asphalt parking lot in front of Quan’s, the traffic meanwhile whizzing by on Concord Road.  I thought about going home then, calling it a night, maybe changing some things.  On the other hand, I had it on good authority, actually the best authority, that this season is fucked anyway, no matter what.   So I am pretty much operating with impunity now, as I see it.  I cannot make things any worse.  So, I turned and headed back into the dark bar.  The cigarette smoke and the bourbon smell was mingling together, and they rushed up to meet me as I walked back in, right as my buddy was telling me to sit back down, and have a few more.

So I did.

**********

INJURIES

Houston
•Alberto Arias (RHP) – Out for the season after right rotator cuff surgery

•Tim Byrdak (LHP) – Placed on the 15-day DL on May 3 with a strained hamstring

San Francisco
•Mark DeRosa (INF) – Day to day with numbness in his left hand

•Bengie Molina (C) – Day to day with a tight hamstring

•Edgar Renteria (SS) – Placed on the 15-day DL on May 7 with a strained right groin.  I used to make fun of strained groins, but now I have one.  Not so funny.

•Freddy Sanchez (2B) – Day to day with a strained right shoulder

**********

My cousin Fred is pretty fucking big.

He is not overly tall, 6′ 0″ or 6′ 1″, tops.  And while he weighs over 200 lbs., the weight is stretched over a large-boned frame, so he doesn’t look fat at all.  He is just one of those people who exude bigness.  When you are around him, you think of this big person you have with you.

Fred is just plain big, in some ways.  His feet are size 16, and he has most of his footwear custom-made, which he says is expensive.  According to his first wife, a clinical psychologist who is crazy as hell, there is something to the foot size/dick size corollary; although I don’t remember anyone asking her about it at the time.  Fred shipped her off to the loony bin years ago, and good riddance.

Fred and I grew up in different towns, but we saw each other fairly often, and we were pretty close, as kids.  Not as close as brothers – we didn’t spend enough time together for that – but I would imagine we were closer than most first cousins, and we still are.  Fred is one of those people who, whenever his name comes up, this warm feeling comes over me.  He is about my age, he is a good guy, he thinks like me, and we have had lots of fun together over the years.

One time we were staying down at the beach for several days, in a rented cabin.  Me, several of my school friends, one of my brothers, and Fred.  It was probably Spring Break, I know we were 18 or so.  One night we were having this big party at our cabin, mostly friends of ours who were staying at the beach, too.  Along the way, Fred OD’d on beer, and passed out on the floor in the middle of the cabin.  No problem, people just stepped over him, or around him, and the party carried on.  At one point three or four guys were standing there drinking beer, looking over Fred, and dispassionately discussing his present state.  “I wonder if he’ll come to before the end of the party?”  “How many beers do you think he had?”  “I hope he wakes up before he pisses himself, that would be kind of nasty.”  Then one of the guys, wholly unintentionally, dropped an almost full can of Natural Light, right on Fred’s head.  It made a sound I heard clearly, over the music and conversation, all the way across the room.  But Fred hardly stirred.  A halo of beer and foam formed around his head on the rug, and someone said he would probably wake up and wonder if he’d gone to heaven.  Up to then, I’d pretty much always called him Fredward, or sometimes Freddy if I was in a rush.  But from that night on, my cousin was universally known as Fred the Hammerhead, or just Hammerhead.  He seemed to like the nickname all right.  Not that it mattered, we would’ve called him that regardless.

Fred was with us the night of the phosphorous ocean.  That was an early spring night around that same time when a bunch of us were drinking at night down on the beach on Bolivar Peninsula, and a rare incursion of phosphorous caused the whitecaps of the breaking waves to glow greenish-white in the moonlight, shooting right to left across the horizon each time a wave broke.  If you dragged your foot across the sand, the track where you’d dragged it would glow.  At the time, none of us had ever seen that before, plus we’d been drinking for hours.  The night, especially in retrospect, took on an almost surreal quality.  I sometimes wondered if it had really happened at all.  People who were there still talk about it wistfully.  Most of us ran around like idiots, screaming and playing in the glowing water and sand.  Meanwhile, Fredward went to his Silverado and reached behind the seat and pulled out one of those folding shovels like you’d see in an army surplus store.  I’m not sure why he carried it, but it did not really surprise me that he did.  Anyway, while the rest of us were acting like retarded fools, Fred calmly shoveled several hundred pounds of the glowing sand into the bed of his truck.  He figured he’d take some home, spread it around his flower beds and such.  Conversation starter.  Fred was always thinking ahead like that.

I was with him the day his sister died.  She was killed on the beach highway, on her way home.  She wasn’t driving, it was her and three of her friends, and they were all pretty drunk, I heard; as was the guy who crossed the center line and hit them head on.  And probably a majority of everyone else on that highway that day.  Everybody involved in the wreck died at the scene, basically.  We had been down at the beach for the day, and Fred and I headed back to town 45 minutes to an hour after his sister and her friends did.  When we came up on the wreck, we didn’t know what it was at first.  We were freaking out because there were cops everywhere.  We were both pretty loaded, and we thought we’d come up on a DPS sobriety check roadblock.  But it wasn’t; and when we saw what was left of the light blue Cutlass 442 her friend had been driving, we knew what had happened.  I don’t know my immediate reaction, I just remember that my emotions at the time were dulled by being intoxicated.  So were Fred’s; I distinctly remember him being almost stoic when he found out his sister had been somewhere in the tangled mess of that Cutlass.  Even though they were essentially D.O.A., Fred’s sister and another girl were life-flighted to UTMB.  So we jumped back in his truck and turned around and hauled ass to Galveston.  By the time we got there, his sis was long gone.  I remember sitting in the hospital while Fred called his parents and let them know what had happened.  We were sobered up by then, and I felt myself getting emotional, but Fred’s voice never broke.  I admired him a lot for that.  His little sister has been gone now 31 years, but I can still remember parts of that day very clearly.  Too much, too soon.

Fred lives in South Carolina now, in Georgetown, near the ocean.  He’s a civil engineer.  We don’t see each other much anymore, but we keep in touch by e-mail and the occasional phone call.  Fred is a big Astros fan, always has been, and he tries to follow the team as best he can; but he says even with his MLB package and the internet, it is not the same as living close by.  I called him last week, on his birthday, and at one point he asked me, “Are things as bad as they seem?”  Yes, I told him, maybe worse.  That’s what he thought, he said, but he’d hoped he was wrong.  But, he can see it all the way from fucking South Carolina.  Fuck.

While talking last week, we remembered the night of the phosphorous ocean for some reason, and I asked him what he ever did with all that sand he’d loaded in his truck that night.  He laughed and said some of it is in the pitchers mound on the AAA field at the Little League park in his hometown.  The sand had never glowed at all after that night on the beach, and I was glad to hear that.  What happened that night, if it happened, was fleeting.  Only the people who were there are left to tell the story.

Fred’s sister didn’t make it past age 15, and so I will always remembered her as young and pretty and a little bit wild and really funny; and not as what she might have become, good or bad.  I sometimes wonder if she was ever even here at all, if I didn’t dream her up like I sometimes think I dreamt up that glowing night on the beach, so many years ago.

But I didn’t dream her up, and I feel like I will see her again someday.  On a night when the phosphorescent ocean is glowing in the background, the gleam shooting like lightning across the horizon, as the endless waves keep breaking and breaking, out beyond the first sandbar, before rolling up and washing over our bare feet and toes, as we stand together there on the beach.  I will be with her there on the beach that night, and I will put my arm around her when she shivers in the wind, and I will say something clever, and then I will listen to her terrific laugh.  Fred will be there, too, of course; sitting in his lawn chair next to his truck, drinking a beer and listening to the Astros game on the radio.  I’ll be able to hear the broadcast in the background, over the sound of the breaking waves.  The team will have pulled out another stellar win that night, moving decisively into first place.  Yes.  From my dreams to God’s ears.

No one hears his lonely sighs
There are no blankets where he lies
In all his deepest dreams he flies
With sweet Melissa

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Astros get swept by the Giants, 0-3.

THE WEATHER

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Lady census taker
Come on in and check me out
Sit down here beside me
And tell me what it’s all about

You won’t mind if I feel your thigh?
Mark it down, I’m just that kind of guy
I’m in love with you and I don’t know why
Lady census taker.

Lady census taker
This must be my lucky year
I didn’t mail back my survey
Just so they would send you here

You’ve got those twitchy eyes
The kind that mesmerize
Bet you’ve counted lots of guys
Lady census taker.

Lady census taker
It’s great that you’re getting paid
Though I didn’t realize the feds
Were hiring meth heads these days

Oh, you’re probably a tweaker, but I don’t care
I dig sunken cheeks and long, stringy hair
And that chipped front tooth looks so debonair
Lady census taker.

Lady census taker
You make this full-time cynic hot
The way you hold that clipboard up to your chest
It shows me just what you got

I don’t know if you counted all my children and cars
Or how many nights I spend alone in bars
But I’ll bet you remember our little trip to the stars
Lady census taker.

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