No Sad Songs

by Frank Morelli

  “Hey,” she says as she rests her headphones down around her neck. “How was school, kiddos?”

  “Like being hunted down by cannibals,” I say.

  “I figured,” she says. “Your ugly mug was on the news all day in there.” She waves her cigarette in the direction of the hospital.

  “How’s she doing?” I ask.

  “Not one of her best days,” she says. “But she’s tough. I’ve seen her get through worse.” Her voice trails off and, for the first time since I met her, she seems scared. Vulnerable.

  “Yeah,” I say as Sofia grabs a small sketchpad off the bench and buries her face in it. “If she’s anything like you, cancer better run and hide.” That perks her up a little.

  “How about you?” she asks.

  “Don’t let him tell you differently,” John chimes in from his perch behind the bench. “He’s enjoying every minute of this crap.”

  “What?” Who the hell is this kid? Ten minutes ago he was my platoon brother. Now he’s making me look like a dipshit—not that I care or anything. But he keeps it up. Just won’t let it go.

  “You should see yourself, Gabe. Pretty soon I think you might set up a table at lunch and charge for autographs. It kind of makes me want to puke.”

  “Puke? Are you serious? Didn’t you see me running from that place with you today? Was I imagining that?”

  “Maybe for my sake. Once Marlie was in the picture I thought you were gonna negotiate me to the enemy.”

  I’m about to lay into the kid like never before when the whole damn argument gets interrupted. By laughter. Sofia’s laughter. Her sketchbook is gripped tight against her chest and she’s about two loud chuckles away from rolling off the bench and into the street.

  “What’s so funny?” I ask and I’m feeling pretty crummy right now—the way you feel when everyone’s laughing and you don’t know why.

  “You,” she says between breaths. “I just imagined you and this Barbie girl together.”

  “Marlie,” I say.

  “Whatever. Is there a difference?”

  “Not really,” John says, and now they’re both laughing in my face. I swear I can’t win with these people. Laugh at me because I’m a nobody and then laugh twice as hard when I actually become a somebody.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Keep on laughing,” I say. “We’ll see if that’s still the case when I take Marlie to the prom. We’ll have to double date, of course, with John and his hand. Maybe we’ll drop by the hospital afterwards and see what kind of imprint the folding chair leaves on your ass, Sofia.”

  I stop, realizing I have stepped a little beyond the realms of friendly sparring. John looks shocked—like he just swallowed a blowfish and it’s all caught up somewhere near his Adam’s apple. Sofia is stone-faced, but she dives back into the rescue of her sketchpad. I feel kind of guilty, so I try to soften the blow.

  “Whatever,” I say, “I want all of this to end. I want to go back to my quiet, little nothing life and just move on.”

  “Then confess.”

  The words come out of her mouth like jagged icicles and she doesn’t bother to lift her gaze from the drawing.

  “I did confess,” I say. “That’s why—”

  “No, Gabe.” John’s voice is forceful, steady. He means business. “She means the truth. Confess the truth.”

  And here we are again. Back to sitting with the two imposters who pretend they’re my friends; spineless cowards who know nothing of the power of a man’s word; who know nothing of the bond shared between father and son, and the promises one makes to his own blood—living or dead.

  “No way!” I say flatly. “Out of the question.”

  Then I’m up off the bench and I’m gone. I mean, I just escaped a raving horde of lunatics at Schuylkill High; I’m not about to sit here and get devoured by my so-called friends. I leave John and Sofia sitting on the bench together and walk home alone. They deserve each other. The bastards.

  Oh, and I hope John has fun driving home on the merits of his Schuylkill High School student ID. Something tells me the yearbook committee doesn’t hold the same jurisdiction as the Department of Motor Vehicles. Whatever. He’ll figure it out.

  Gabe LoScuda

  English 4A – Personal Essay # 6

  Mr. Mastrocola

  January 12

  Promise

  Dad often claimed the best way to watch a baseball game was not to watch it at all. And yet he never missed a single game of Fightin’ Phils action in my life. His trick consisted of three objects: a cooler full of Yuengling, a beach chair, and a handheld radio that was so old it looked like he mined it out of the archives of the Smithsonian.

  I once came across a few lines of poetry by a Serbian-American poet named Dejan Stojanovic fittingly titled “Simplicity.” In just four lines, Dejan captured my dad’s pre-game Phillies routine better than I could have done with a video camera and a doubleheader on tap. He wrote, “The most complicated skill / Is to be simple. / To say more while saying less / Is the secret of being simple.” Taking that as a universal truth, my father might have been one of the simplest creatures on the planet.

  On hot, July days Dad would carry his simple items about twenty feet from the back of the garage to the driveway. He’d set them up like he was in the parking lot at Veteran’s Stadium before a game, tailgating with the rest of the Philadelphia wildlife. He’d crack the cap on a Yuengy and tune his radio to 1210 AM. “Screw TV,” he’d say. Then he’d fiddle with the extendable rabbit ears with only a few of the softer vulgarities under his breath. Sooner or later the static would give way to the hush of the stadium and the bass-drenched voice of one Harry Kalas—Dad’s play-by-play man. Maybe the greatest of all time.

  “Why would I want to miss this, Gabey?” he’d say. “Sitting in a hot ballpark? No Harry? That’s not baseball.” It was stone cold, middle-aged logic at its best.

  Of course, Dad would never make the connection between his choice of profession and our annual, Cal Ripken-like streak of rarely seeing the inside of an actual ballpark. At least not out loud. But it always kind of bothered me. See, Dad being a teacher gave him all sorts of time in the summer to go on any number of adventures with his family. Problem was, the salary—you know, only getting paid ten months out of the year—didn’t help us accomplish much of anything. By my calculations, we missed exactly eighty opportunities to watch a live Phillies game every season. At least that left us with one home game. Dad’s promise—his once a year departure from the simplicity he thrived upon. I guess promises trump the simple life in the same way an ace beats a deuce. In fact, I’d guess a promise trumps most anything.

  He’d say, “If I have to leave my beach chair for a game, we might as well do it right.” And that’s what we’d do. Once a year. One game. Great seats. All-you-can-eat. Just me, Dad, Gramps, the sounds of the game, and about two pounds of ballpark franks. It was glorious.

  A few weeks after my eighth birthday, Dad hoisted me up on his shoulders. He walked us out through the garage—past his beach chair leaning up against the wall, and his radio lying silent on the workbench. There was no cooler in sight.

  On the driveway, he popped the Volvo’s passenger door and slid me in the car. “I promised you a game,” he said as he slid his weather-beaten Phillies hat out of his back pocket and slapped it down over his neatly combed hair. “We got the Astros today. What do you think?”

  “Ten nothing, Phillies,” I said. To be honest, I didn’t care about the result. All I could think about were pink puffs of cotton candy and rivers of chocolate ice cream melting down the side of a cone.

  “Ten nothing? With Nolan Ryan on the mound?” He chuckled a bit under his breath, then said to no one in particular, “My son must be crazy.” Then he hopped in the driver’s seat, and flicked on the radio while the car was still in reverse.

  The game was in the top of the first already. We were late. As usual. Sometimes I think Dad made it that way on purpose—almost like a compromise. It allow
ed him to keep his one-game promise to me and still catch a few minutes of playful banter between Harry the “K” and his on-air sidekick, Hall-of-Famer Richie Ashburn. It was a cool tradition, I guess. I’d pop a whole pack of Doublemint—all five sticks—in my mouth and pretend I had a full lip of chew stored in there. Dad would swing by Grandpa’s house on the way, and we’d head east on the expressway, following the winding glaze of the Schuylkill River as it slogged casual canoe paddlers and UPenn crew teams alike between the columns of ancient oak trees and brick-faced boathouses. We’d snake past the art museum on the way and I’d make Dad swear to me that the mountainous pile of steps in front were the same ones scaled by Rocky Balboa. Every time. And then we’d pull off into South Philly, park a few blocks off of Broad Street, and be inside the stadium by the bottom of the second.

  Veteran’s Stadium stood there on Broad, waiting for us like a 70s-era fortress. Dad grabbed my hand and turned our tickets over to the usher, who ripped them at the perforations and handed them back. Then we stepped through the turnstile into once-a-year glory.

  “Section 326,” Dad said to Gramps as he glanced down at the ticket stubs. “Right behind the plate.”

  “As always,” Gramps said. He tipped the brim of his Philadelphia A’s cap to his son—Grandpa always had to be a throwback—and Dad nodded in reply. Sometimes it was easier to steal a sign from the visitors’ third base coach than it was to figure out the simplest communication between these guys.

  We walked around the interior concourse of the 300 level—a hollow cavern with sticky floors, fans in their red and white pinstripes zigzagging in all directions, and the perpetual stench of stale beer rising up in plumes like mustard gas. Dad gripped my hand and led us past a set of old bleachers, down a ramp, and out into the open air. My eyes darted to the green of the artificial turf; to the thick, white lines that cut precise incisions from each corner of home plate to the imposing, yellow foul poles that loomed overhead; to the pennants—all perfect, little slices of pie—that waved at me from the top of the stadium; to the tops of the dugouts—one painted in the triumphant, script lettering of the home team, the other simply printed ‘visitors.’

  It was like a supersonic slideshow of boyhood wonder. A kaleidoscope of our nation’s pastime. And it was like that, for me, every time Dad fulfilled his promise and brought me there. To the Vet. Philadelphia’s own Roman Coliseum. The only place where three generations of LoScudas could sit side-by-side, spit sunflower seeds on the ground, and shout obscenities at perfect strangers—all while solving every flaw in the basic structure of the entire franchise, while second-guessing every single call made by the manager (and probably the umpires), and forecasting the complete statistical output of every Phillies player from now until 2055. That usually started around the fourth inning—the Phils’ second time through the order.

  “This kid’s got promise,” Grandpa said to Dad. I cracked a seed between my teeth and watched Von Hayes stride up to the plate. He was all arms and legs; a tall left-handed giraffe with a mullet hanging out the back of his helmet. Dad shook his head.

  “Yeah, but will he live up to it?”

  “He knocked in eighty-two runs with the Indians,” Grandpa said. “I think that shows promise.” There was a loud crack and a wave of people poured out of their seats in the next section. A second later a foul ball—just a tiny speck from this distance—shot back past them like a bullet. Strike one.

  “Well, he’d better show something,” Dad said as Hayes reset himself in the box. “We gave up the farm for him.” There was a smattering of boos on a low outside pitch. Hayes shook his head at the umpire. Strike two.

  “Trillo and Vukovich are washed up,” Grandpa argued.

  “Forget Trillo and Vuke. What about Franco?”

  “Julio Franco? He’s a prospect. They never pan out.” Hayes took a mighty swing-and-a-miss and the catcher fired the ball down to third like a missile. I watched it bounce from infielder to infielder like a pinball machine. Around the horn. I love that stuff.

  “We’ll see,” Dad said. And Gramps decided to drop his side of the argument.

  By the end of the sixth inning, with the Phils unable to get anything going against Nolan Ryan and the defense unable to catch anything not in virus form, the score was barely memorable. Eight to one or seven to two. I can’t remember. But I can say I’d filled myself, by the mid innings, with everything from popcorn to peanuts to Cracker Jacks. I might have actually been the kid they sang about in the song. But I wasn’t satisfied. No cotton candy. And you haven’t actually been to a ball game unless you’ve had yourself a cotton candy. Maybe that’s just my rule, but it’s a good one. I wasn’t leaving the Vet without at least one huge, puffy mouthful of the stuff.

  “Dad, when can I have cotton candy?” I asked.

  “As soon as you see a vendor.”

  Problem was, I hadn’t seen a cotton candy vendor trucking his usual eight pack of pink, fluffy globes all night. I knew, once we hit the seventh inning stretch, all would be lost because that’s when the vendors seemed to up and vanish. It was like there was a dastardly mastermind hidden somewhere under the concourse level—in the Cave of Concessions. He’d push a button midway through the seventh and all his little vending minions would dematerialize on the spot and converge before his throne. And they’d spend the next three innings bashing all the whiny brats they were forced to serve that evening. Kind of like a form of concessional therapy that went something like:

  “See that snotty bastard in Section 326?”

  “The one crying for his cotton candy?”

  “That’s the one. Well, I’ve got his cotton candy right here.” And then he stuffs the whole damn lot—tray and all—in the toilet, and there’s a loud flush.

  I noticed these kinds of things at the ballpark. They stood out to me a lot more than the depth and positioning of the second baseman with one out and runners at the corners—much to Dad’s displeasure. But hey—a kid’s gotta get his sugar.

  “I don’t see any vendors,” I told Dad when it became impossible to stifle my anxiety for even one more pitch.

  “Be patient, Gabe. They’ll be around.”

  “It’s almost the end of the seventh inning,” I whined.

  “We can get one out in the parking lot.”

  “I don’t want parking lot cotton candy!” My whining reached a new level of annoying—by design, of course. Dad hated that kind of crap, especially during a baseball game.

  “Look, Gabe—”

  “But I want ballpark cotton—”

  “Alright, alright,” he said and he looked over at Gramps who shook his head solemnly. I knew this would work. “I’ll take you when the inning is over.”

  This was unacceptable. An outrage. I would never let it stand. “I can go myself,” I said.

  “Oh, sure. It really seems like you’re grown up enough to handle yourself here—in a crowded ballpark.”

  “I know where it is, Dad. I—”

  “Sal.” The voice of reason as always, Gramps was golden. “Let the kid be a man today. We’re at the Vet. He’s not a baby anymore.”

  Dad was silent. Brooding. He looked at Gramps with a blankness in his eyes. Then he glanced over his shoulder to the tunnel along the concourse. I looked, too. It was empty, but for a single usher in his white Phillies polo shirt and a pair of khakis. Very official. No danger there.

  “Make me a promise,” Dad said. “Go directly to the cotton candy stand, buy what you need, and come directly back.” He pulled a ten-dollar bill out of his wallet and held it before me. “Will you do that?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I promise.”

  “I want change.” He handed me the bill and watched as I climbed the mountain of stairs up to the tunnel and passed through into the darkness.

  Once inside, I realized the concourse at Veteran’s Stadium was not built with the intention of ever having someone less than six feet tall walk on it.

  It was like being trapped in a stampede
. I took two steps and was nearly beheaded by a stroller the size of a tank. I sidestepped my way around a group of staggering Phillies fans as they shouted epithets of the “You suck!” “Go home!” variety to an elderly couple that happened to be wearing Astros hats. I clung to the wall and inched my way along it like a little kid trying to skate his way around an ice rink for the first time. The cotton candy stand was in sight. Only thirty or forty more paces.

  And then I realized, man, I really needed to use the bathroom. I looked up and, as luck would have it, a sign with a two-legged stick figure—not wearing a little triangle for a dress—hung above me. I knew I’d promised Dad just to the candy stand and back, but I figured he’d be pretty annoyed if I sat back down and then asked him to take me to the bathroom two seconds later. So I pushed through the doorway—it was door less, really more of a gaping crack in the concourse wall with a putrid odor emanating from it. Old men, young men, little kids with their fathers standing behind them, all pushed forward at once like a school of salmon swimming upstream. Only the stream we were all pushing towards was like no stream I’d ever seen. It flowed directly through the room along a flatiron trough that’d been dug into the floor for just this purpose. Men and boys stood elbow-to-elbow, pieces in hands, and relieved themselves all over the wall, the floor, most likely on each other. I wanted no part of this, so I spun around and swam back downstream, through the wreaking chasm, and out into the concourse. I could hold it.

  I resumed my path along the wall, pushing past old men in maroon and baby blue Phils gear with the name “Schmidt” stitched on the back. I stepped on half of a mushy hot dog bun and squashed it off the bottom of my shoe, leaving it gooey and sticky with each new step.

  I finally reached the stand and got in line. There had to be twenty people—like Pope John Paul was making change behind the counter or something. I stood there with my hand in my pocket holding back the flow, sacrificing my own dignity for a chance to eat a bunch of sugar spun around in a giant hairdryer. It was starting to seem kind of ridiculous, even to me, after ten minutes of standing in the same spot. Then something caught my attention. A loud thud. The kind of noise you might hear if, say, a gymnast mistimed a jump and landed belly-first on a wrestling mat. It intrigued me. Then I heard a few cheers—and they weren’t coming from the field.