Nobody Bats a Thousand

by Steve Schmale

  Turning his back to his son, Big Al finished his cocktail in two hollow gulps. “Jimmy, give me a ride home,” he said to me.

  While the few people left in the room, the assistant cook and busboy in from the kitchen, Lee and two or three fresh customers, were frozen, still looking at Junior lying motionless on the floor, the first thing that went through my mind was ‘all right, beer break’.

  I ran behind the bar and knelt down to grab my jacket while simultaneously cracking open the cooler door just enough to sneak out two beers. I tucked them into the inside pockets of my coat that I gingerly slipped on over my arms and shoulders. I’d given Al a ride home only once before. His place was only ten minutes away, but I figured I needed two beers for the ride back to the restaurant; the first one wouldn’t last long. I told Lee to start cleaning up, and then I led Big Al out to my car.

  “If you want to drink and drive don’t let me stop you,” Big Al said after we had driven about two blocks. “I just hope you brought a beer for me.”

  I was shocked, both because he’d busted me after I’d thought I’d been so sneaky and because in all the time I’d worked for him I’d never seen him drink anything but red wine or good scotch.

  “Sure thing, boss.” I opened a beer, handed it to him, and then opened the other for myself. Al had his window down with his arm out. The air rushing in was swift and cold, but I didn’t say anything. I just turned up the heater, turned off the radio, and drove in silence with no other cars on the road.

  “It’s always something,” Big Al said when we were about a mile from his house. “Like this business isn’t hard enough already. Now, three years in a row I got IRS on my ass for no damn good reason.” He looked at me. I kept my eyes straightforward on the road. “Hey, all ya gotta have is an Italian last name and own a restaurant and they figure you have to be connected.” He leaned his head back, sucked down his beer in one massive pull, then put his arm out of the window and smashed the empty on the passing asphalt. He gazed at me with a look of wonder. “I ain’t done nothing wrong in my whole life.” His look lingered a few seconds before he turned to look straightforward, then turned to look at me again. “I love my son. I love him very much.”

  “I know you do boss.” I looked him straight in the eyes before I returned my focus to the road.

  “How? How do you know?”

  “Because you held back. You could have smacked him a lot harder than you did.”

  Al nodded his head a couple of times. “Enough said.” He sat and waited until I pulled up to his house.

  “And it’s really too bad.” Al pushed open the door. “That band would have been pretty good if they would have slowed down, and they weren’t so damn loud. That singer had a pretty good voice.”

  “I agree.”

  I slowly drove back to work. When I walked into the bar there was just Lee and Little Al. I locked the door behind me, walked behind the bar, and fixed myself a triple Stoli and tonic in a tall chimney glass.

  Little Al was sitting at the bar being dramatic, holding a towel filled with ice against the side of his face. “My old man’s a big prick,” he said.

  “You’re not getting me in the middle of anything between you and your dad, Al.” I bagged the money from register, checked to see that everything was clean and put away, then leaned against the back counter and took a long satisfying drink of my noxious cocktail.

  “If my old man knew you were in here drinking his liquor he’d slap you.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “Well, pour it out. We’re leaving.”

  “Junior, I’m going to stay right here, drink this cocktail then I might have another. Then I’m gonna lock up and leave, just like I have five nights a week for the last four years.” I jumped up and planted my ass on the back counter to take the weigh off my feet. “If you don’t like that plan, Junior, we can call your dad right now and see what he thinks…you a betting man, Junior? I just bet you he wouldn’t be too thrilled to hear from your lame ass right now. What do you think?”

  “You’re the lame asshole. I know you’ve always been jealous of me ‘cause I’m young and I’ve got it going on.”

  “Boy, you’re too much, Junior. You know what your problem is? They’ve pumped your whole generation so full of that self-esteem crap, you’ve got it coming out of your ears and your assholes. You all figure you deserve to start out running the company instead of mopping floors and paying your dues. You’ve all OD’ed on self-esteem, and you better hope they find an antidote in time before the real world reaches out and grabs you by the balls. You all think you’re so special. Trust me, very few people are special. Everybody’s different, but few are special.”

  “You stupid old shit. What else would I expect from a middle-aged loser bartender with nothing going on.”

  “Oh, you can’t get to me, Junior, I can take it. You see, that’s the other major problem with all you little shits. You love to dish it out, but you’ve never learned how to take it. But you’ll learn, sooner or later you’ll learn. Because you have no choice.” Little Al started to say something, “SHUT UP!” I yelled as I hopped down, came around the bar in a flash, threw a stool out of the way and filled its space, my chest pumped out, and my face two inches away from Little Al’s.

  “Now I’m going to let Lee out, and you’re leaving with him, ‘cause if you don’t get the fuck out of here, I might be tempted to slap you on the other side of your face just to even things out. But I won’t be as tender as your old man was, that I guarantee.” I gave him a big sadistic smile he wasn’t quite sure of, and he gave me the nastiest glare he could muster. His lips were shaking he so badly wanted to say something, but finally he got up, and ten seconds later he and Lee were out the door, which I locked behind them.

  I dropped the money in the safe, did a walk-through, checked the bathrooms and all the doors, turned down the lights, fixed myself another strong drink, and sat in the dark enjoying the stillness and the quiet. That was always my favorite time in a bar. A special time when the night was over, the door was locked, and the room was silent.

  It was already a little past twelve. I realized by the time I got home and watched a little TV until I was relaxed enough to go to sleep it would be two or three in the morning. After six or eight hours of slumber, I’d wake up, have enough time to eat and read the paper, maybe workout and do some laundry before it was time to be back here to do it all over again. Same time, same place; a routine that wasn’t exactly routine with a slightly different plot to the same simple story. But it’s my livelihood. I don’t mind it all too much, but it wouldn’t matter if I did, because that’s what it’s all about, survival. Making it through day to day, keeping some money in your pocket and holding on to your sanity, stringing the days into weeks, the weeks into years. Survival is the key, the connection. Because rich or poor, genius or idiot, drunk and decadent, or sober and pious, while life is the one mysterious odyssey no one avoids, like I said before, everybody has a cross to bear and we are all in this together. The way I see it, there are no purer facts.

  The End

  IN SPITE OF OURSELVES

  A few days after her fiftieth birthday, Mary Jean’s life hit a fork in the road. Her road was forked. Her life was forked. She was forced to make a decision, and that was the last thing she wanted to do.

  Every crisis has a beginning. An embryonic twist or turn of fate which often displays little or no sign of a tempest brewing. For Mary Jean the birth of her current dilemma could probably be pinpointed to the exact moment she stepped onto the bus starting her latest journey back to the States from the tiny Mexican village where she spent her yearly vacations, intentionally working on her tan, and unintentionally working on her beer belly.

  Casa de Tiempo was the name of the village, a beautiful rustic spot on the Pacific Coast accessible only by boat or bus. It had few phones, few televisions, and no worries to plague the old hippies and middle-aged Yuppies searching for a cheap warm winter respite off the normal
tourist’s beaten path. For more than two decades Mary Jean had managed to rat hole enough money and finagle the time away from whatever job or marriage she was involved in to make the trip to Tiempo for at least a month each winter. She would stay in the same cheap hotel, eat inexpensive seafood washed down with low-priced Mexican beer and tequila in the company of a whole group of like-minded souls from all parts of the U.S. and Europe. Most of her acquaintances had made the annual trip so often that they had fostered a familiarity rarely seen outside that of a tribe or large extended family. Every year the same recurring clan, give or take a few, hung together, ate and drank and watched the beautiful sunsets together more out of habit and convenience than any particular like for one another. Their bond cemented in the facts that they all spoke English and were in a town so small they would have had a rough time avoiding each other even if they were of a mind to.

  It was this surrogate family, this circuitous band of gypsies that helped Mary Jean celebrate her chronological journey into the downhill side of her first century, during most of the day and all of the night before her actual journey back to California. A small part of this group, the toxic-washed survivors, helped put her on the bus to Puerto Vallarta with her luggage intact, a year’s supply of several types of script drugs she had legally acquired at bargain Mexican prices, and the worst hangover she could remember in thirty years of trying.

  She hadn’t planned on staying in Mexico until her birthday in late February, but her money had held up better than expected, and she felt her waitress job back in Ashland was secure since she’d been there longer than anyone else, plus she was the only chick on the staff who wasn’t a coked-up idiot or just naturally stupid. So, when her friend Nadine journeyed back to Ashland, back to the fog and cold of California’s center, she took a check from Mary Jean to cover her rent, tying up her only loose end, allowing the slender blonde another six weeks of inebriated bliss under the tropic sun as she eased into the plight of becoming half a century old.

  But the six weeks sped by faster than a round of sushi at a Birkenstocks company picnic. Then, after the bus ride over the mountains, a plane ride from Puerto Vallarta to Mexico City to catch a flight back to the States, she now sat quietly fuming in a windowless room watching a squad of arrogant custom agents dressed like forest rangers doggedly searching through her possessions intent on finding something that broke the rules.

  The fact that Mary Jean had only one small suitcase and a backpack to search seemed to annoy the government workers. MJ studied them and pictured each one as the kid in grammar school who sometime during recess would always yell, “I’m telling,” as they ran off to rat to the teacher.

  It was sometime during her strip-search that Mary Jean tried to calm herself with the unavoidable fact that if their positions were reversed she undoubtedly would have picked herself out of the crowd for a thorough once-over. To say she didn’t look good would have been an understatement. The morning after her final blowout in Tiempo, during her frantic preparation to catch the only bus leaving that day, she hadn’t had the courage to look at herself in the mirror a second time. So, without applying even a pinch of makeup to her red blotched face, she had just pulled her blonde hair back into a ponytail, put on her Forty Niners cap and hit the road on the long journey that had no doubt contributed even more to the downward spiral in her appearance; she looked haggard enough to be a suspect. Still, her rationalization of the custom agent’s motives did little to divert her urge to beat each and every one of them with an aluminum baseball bat. This feeling lightened only slightly once the agents finally displayed their utter ineptitude by giving Mary Jean the OK to go after they had somehow not stumbled across her stash of Ativan, Valium and Percodan she had cleverly hidden inside some of her toiletry items.

  She gathered her things, and mumbled, “assholes,” audibly but without abandon as she left the room and crossed the imaginary line back into the good old USA, not knowing her sentence had yet to be fully served. It seemed the little fete with the US Customs Department had caused her to miss her connecting flight to Ashland. The next flight was seven hours away. She took these facts, along with several hours’ worth of anger, frustration, and alcohol-induced pain to the boss of the poor cowering jerk at the ticket window who couldn’t satisfy her needs. The gentleman in charge was kind and forward-looking enough to refund the remaining portion of her ticket, and to arrange a cab ride for her all the way across town to skid row, where the huge Greyhound bus station sat like a giant gleaming symbol of hope and progress amid all the people outside it sleeping on the sidewalk in cardboard boxes.

  The bus station in Ashland was not in the best part of town either. But Mary Jean, so tired she was borderline delusional, arrived just after sunup after stops in Bakersfield, Delano, Visalia, Hanford and Selma where the only thing that surprised MJ about the new passengers was none of them attempted to board the bus with a pet goat.

  There was an empty cab outside the station. She fell into the backseat with her belongings, and gave the driver her address. The driver, a friendly sort and obviously a morning person, hadn’t gone more than a block and had only begun a cheery monologue about the ugly weather when Mary Jean interrupted.

  “Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but I just want a ride to the Pyramid District, so shut the fuck up! Would ya?”

  And he did. Immediately.

  Every town of any size has one, an arts district, a bohemian-flavored fortress protected from suburbia, an enclave of non-conformity permeated with a spirit of freedom and jazz and unguarded optimism. Though varied in age and size, such areas seem to develop in similar stages. First, the low rents of a decaying part of a city attracts different sects from the big collective alternative soul, followed by the vegetarian restaurants and small coffeehouses and bars with mismatched garage sale furniture and live music and poetry readings springing forth amid winds of pungent marijuana and incense smells. The second stage, adolescence, follows when moneyed hipsters, well-off due to solid jobs or wealthy ancestors, become entranced with the area’s mood and popularity enough to open clubs, galleries, restaurants, bookstores, and more coffeehouses, intent more on being part of the scene than actually showing any profit from their ventures. The third stage, adulthood as it were, is when the area reaches its pinnacle or begins to flounder, depending on one’s perspective, as the corporate giants get a whiff of the possibilities and move in with both guns drawn.

  Ashland’s North Beach, its SoHo, its Venice Beach was the Pyramid District. A loosely bordered area in the center of town flourishing around the recently refurbished Pyramid Theater, its towering, neon-striped pyramid a local landmark for fifty years. For many years, even before it was cool, this is where Mary Jean resided. She had seen it grow, and though she was ambivalent about its development with Starbucks in full form, Blockbuster Video doing brisk business in the shade of the giant pyramid above the theater, and Border’s Books on its way, she could see herself living nowhere else in Ashland. She simply could not handle living in any other part of town for Ashland, outside of the Pyramid District, was one big suburban sprawl set smack dab in the middle of the great conservative Bible Belt of California, the San Joaquin Valley. An area so mainstream, homogenous and predictable it was used to test market soft drinks and snack treats before they were forced upon the rest of the nation. A place of such a mindset that during the 1970’s it held the distinction of leading the world per capita in fan mail to Elvis Presley and contributions to Jimmy Swaggert, an honor it continued to hold for many years after the King had died and the Rev. Swaggert was caught being God’s shepherd to the wrong end of the sheep. So, as long as she was stuck here in Ashland, out of habit and necessity, Mary Jean simply could not live anywhere else in town but the Pyramid District. She never saw it as a choice.

  After Mary Jean paid the cabbie, and he beat a hasty retreat, she struggled with her luggage onto the porch of her first-floor apartment, part of an ornately trimmed gothic structure from the 1940’s. She was actua
lly happy to be home. Happy to be here in the cold and overcast of this uptight piece of the planet rather than the fun and heat of the tropics she had left less than twenty-four hours before for no other reason than she was beat, fatigued and frazzled and could not imagine any course other than to crawl into the warmth and comfort of her big canopied bed where she would sleep for about a week.

  She struggled with the key but couldn’t get it to fit into the lock. She set down her backpack, struggled some more but still the key wouldn’t fit; it wasn’t even close. She checked the address on the wall to the side of the door and felt reassured that she wasn’t totally crazy or helplessly delusional from her exhaustion. She had the right place. She was fighting with the lock, jiggling the doorknob when it twisted in her hand; the door opened and she fell into the room and hit the floor. Pulling herself to her hands and knees, she scanned upward: pink furry slippers, hairy legs, a thick yellow bathrobe, and then the head of thirty-year-old kid with closely trimmed black hair and small features came into focus.

  “What the fuck are you doing in my apartment!” she screamed as she came to her feet and backed up two steps.

  “You must be Mary Jean.”

  “Damn straights! But that does not answer my question.”