Running the Bases - Definitely Not a Book About Baseball

by Paul Kropp

  I guess the girl must have felt me looking at her, the way people can tell even across a big room that someone’s eyes are focussed entirely on them. She looked up from her book and stared back at me.

  I panicked. God, she must think I’m a pervert. She’ll have me arrested for…aggressive looking.

  Then the most amazing thing happened. She didn’t give me the usual eyeball brush-off, the expression that said keep-your-aggressive-eyes-off-me-you-jerk. She smiled.

  “Hey, Jeremy,” I said.

  “What?”

  “That girl over there, she smiled at me.”

  “The old bag?”

  “No, the Asian girl. The cute one.”

  “Smiled at you?” he said, amazed. “Al, you sure you’re not hallucinating?”

  “No, she smiled…at me.” I looked around to check the geometry. She was there, the smile was directed across here, but there was nobody else at spot X, so by triangulation and elimination…“Yeah, she smiled at me.”

  “So what are you gonna do?” Jeremy asked. It was the same question he’d started with.

  “Make my move,” I said, getting to my feet.

  Now I won’t pretend I wasn’t scared. In fact, I was terrified. I had never before made “a move,” or at least made a move without practice and coaching beforehand. But now I had reached a place so low, so forlorn, so without hope that nothing I did made any difference. I had a lousy reputation and no prospects. All the girls at my school had already written me off, and they hadn’t yet learned about my upchucking in the limo. I was already at zero. When the limo story got out, I would be in minus numbers, if that were possible. So what did it matter? What did anything matter?

  So I walked over to the girl’s table, my brain fumbling through Maggie’s instructions and anything I could think of to start a conversation. Look at her eyes, I told myself. Smile. Be funny. Don’t be too aggressive.

  And find a hook. I couldn’t just sit down and say that I saw her smiling at me; I needed something…something…the book. I recognized the book.

  “You know,” I said, stopping just across from her. Be confident, I told myself. “I loved that book, too.”

  She looked up at me. “You did?”

  “I did, really,” I told her, in my most sincere voice. The truth was something a little less than that. It was a novel by Michael O’Brien, whose last book had turned into a pretty good movie, but I’d never actually seen this particular book in my life. So maybe loved was a bit strong, but it seemed to be the right thing to say. When you’re tossing out an opening line, truth is the last thing to worry about.

  “I saw you smiling while you were reading,” I told her. “You must be near the end.” Another slick line, I told myself. Surely any book would have something to smile about near the end.

  “No, I’m not that far,” she said. “Is it good?”

  “You’ll love it,” I said. Nothing is so certain as total ignorance. “It’s when…well, I don’t want to spoil it for you. But I know you’ll like the ending.” I hesitated. “Would it be okay if I sit down?” Now that was polite, that was respectful. I was so impressed with myself, surely she’d be impressed too.

  “Oh, fine,” she said, smiling.

  Made it! Conversation: going. Seat: taken. Girl: interested. Now I just had to keep it moving. “Did you see the movie of his last book—what did they call it?”

  “Patterns of Innocence,” she said. “It was so wonderful.”

  “That’s what I thought, too. It’s why I got the new book.”

  “Me too,” she said, her face brightening with an enormous smile. Every tooth was perfect. “They make us read such dull stuff at the college.”

  I choked. College. College! I should have known she was older. I should have been able to see it. She was probably, like, twenty and here I was trying to use pickup lines. Part of me said, Time to retreat, but part of me said, Your BS has worked so far; keep trying. I went with the second part.

  “You’re absolutely right,” I told her, “but nobody’s got the guts to say that.”

  “Well, I’m in computer science, so I guess it’s easy for me to say first-year English is boring. What about you?”

  I could have told her the truth at that point. I could have said, I’m just a pimply-faced teenager in his third year at Regis High School; I’m just a pathetic mass of adolescent flesh that doesn’t have a chance with a girl like you. I could have said that, but those weren’t the words that came out of my mouth.

  “English lit,” I sighed. I tried to make it a wistful sigh.

  Okay, so I don’t know much about wistful sighs. But our English teacher, Mrs. Grunweld, kept on heaving wistful sighs when she talked about Keats and Shelley. Someday I must read Keats or Shelley and find out what all the sighing is about.

  “You must do a lot of reading,” she said. The expression on her face seemed full of some emotion, maybe admiration. It was enough to make me puff up.

  “I try to keep up. It’s hard to find time to read new stuff, like this book.”

  “But you did read it, uh…oh, I don’t know your name.”

  “I’m Alan,” I said, putting out my hand. They always shake hands in movies. When Hugh Grant meets Julia Roberts, or whomever, he always shakes hands.

  “I’m Rochelle,” she said, shaking my hand. “It’s like Rachel with an o.”

  “That’s a beautiful name,” I said. I meant it, too. So maybe I was lying a lot about me, but I wasn’t lying at all about her.

  Rochelle blushed. “You’re not trying to pick me up or something, are you?”

  Now I blushed. “Me? Pick you up?” I asked. It was the old double-question thing, to make me sound kind of innocent. Now what would Hugh Grant do? I asked myself. Hugh Grant would be charming, sweet and honest. “Actually, I am.”

  “Am what?” she asked.

  “I am trying to pick you up. I love your smile. I love that you read Michael O’Brien. And I love that you love the book I love.” Okay, the last bit was over the top, but the effect was perfect.

  She smiled. Her bright eyes looked into mine.

  I smiled back. “So I’m sorry about trying to pick you up, which I know is impolite, but there really is no polite way to do it, is there? I mean, I see a perfect girl sitting here, reading a great book, and I could just let the moment go or I could, as Keats once said, go for it and make a fool of myself.”

  “Did Keats say that?”

  “No, but he must have thought it.”

  “You’re funny, Alan.”

  “Thank you. Usually I’m very serious,” I told her, “but I’m working on being funny.”

  “I kind of like you the way you are,” she said. It was the most honest, sincere sentence that I had ever heard in my life. It almost made me feel bad for lying and exaggerating as much as I had. But another part of me was ready to jump up and shout, “Hey, this hot girl likes me. Likes MEEE!”

  Behind me I heard a cough, and then a faint “Excuse me.” I looked up to see Jeremy with a peculiar expression on his face.

  “Al, sorry, but I’m going to go.”

  “That’s okay,” I told him, “so go. Go.” I could have added a third “Go” but I thought that would be a bit too much.

  “See you tomorrow,” he said, heading off.

  “Professor Jones’s class, first thing,” I called after him, adding just a bit more to my story.

  “You have Jones for first-year lit?” Rochelle asked.

  Oh no! Who would have thought there really was a Professor Jones up at the college? “Well, yeah.”

  “I hear Jones is tough,” she said. “A tough marker.”

  “I don’t know,” I replied, an honest remark. “He must like me, I mean, he must like what I write, my essays and stuff.” Ooh, that did not sound too impressive.

  Rochelle gave me a thoughtful look. “Maybe you’re just really good at literature.” She looked at me with these wonderful bright eyes, so full of appreciation. How could I
tell her the truth?

  “Well, I’m not sure about that,” I replied, “but I do like Keats and Shelley.”

  16

  Still More Advice

  LYING IS TOUGH WORK. Especially if it’s a fairly large, ongoing lie. It’s one thing to tell your parents “I was over at Joe’s house” when you actually went cruising with Rocco Vanzetti in his souped-up Honda. You won’t get pressed for details about what you did, and they’re unlikely to call Joe or actually spot you roaring down 8th Street in the car. A simple one-shot, one-evening lie—that’s the easy kind.

  But a large, ongoing lie requires work and careful research. If I was a first-year student at the college, where did I live? At home. Why? To save money. What else did I take besides Professor Jones’s English class? Well, I had no idea. If we were playing twenty questions, I’d survive maybe three.

  Of course, Rochelle wasn’t grilling me while we sat at Starbucks. If the conversation turned towards school, I’d listen hard, nod my head and sympathize. Then I’d talk about the weather, or the government’s latest idiocy, or some book I’d heard about on TV. My best defence, of course, is that I’m a good listener. It worked with Mel, it worked with Taylor and it was working with Rochelle.

  But when I got home, clutching Rochelle’s phone number written hastily on a scrap of paper, I knew I had to do some work. That’s what the Internet is for, isn’t it? Just log on to the college website, check out the tuition fees, residences and first-year courses.

  Whoa! One look at the fees and I could see why I was living at home. First year, I’d be taking a math course—the easy one, Math 103; a language course—maybe Italian because it’s so poetic; English with good old Jones; and two electives. I picked Philosophy 102, a consideration of moral dilemmas. That would be good. And Art History just to round myself out. Keats, Shelley, Plato and Picasso…a great combination.

  “You BS artist,” Jeremy said when he called me that night. “I could hear you lying through your teeth. How did you pull that off?”

  “With panache,” I told him.

  “You don’t know what panache is.”

  “Yes, I do,” I replied, smiling into the phone, “because I’m a first-year English major with a big vocabulary. And I got a book, Thirty Days to a Brilliant Vocabulary.”

  “She’s going to see right through you.”

  “Sooner or later,” I admitted. “But if I can make it later, maybe I’ll do okay along the way.”

  “I have to hand it to you, Al,” he said. “You’ve got cojones.”

  “I already knew that,” I told him, “but what I really need is brains.”

  The two of us agreed that Maggie need not know about Rochelle. I’m certain that a suggestion like “use lies to pretend you’re something that you’re not” would never be on any of her advice lists. Besides, I was in a territory where Maggie couldn’t give me any good advice. My problem wasn’t in impressing Rochelle, or paying appropriate attention to such a wonderful girl, it was in keeping Rochelle from discovering the pathetic guy I really was.

  So far, I was doing just fine. The next day I made a phone call to the house she shared with a bunch of girls. Once I got past a roommate who seemed to be suffering brain damage, Rochelle was delighted that I’d called. I offered a Friday-night movie date; she came back with a Friday-night play.

  “It’s a Beckett play,” she said. “I’m surprised Dr. Jones didn’t tell you to go.”

  “Ah, Beckett,” I replied, trying to sound knowledgeable. “Very interesting stuff, those Beckett plays.” I kept searching through my memory banks trying to come up with something about a guy named Beckett. Didn’t some British king chop off his head? Must be a different Beckett. Must be the kind of play they don’t do as a made-for-TV movie.

  “Then we can go out after,” she said, “and maybe get a drink or something.”

  A drink, I thought and shivered. After my date with Taylor, I may never drink again. “Yeah, that would be great.”

  “And good luck on your quiz tomorrow,” Rochelle added.

  I was dumbfounded. “Quiz?”

  “Yeah. Dr. Jones is giving you a quiz on the Romantic poets. One of my roommates is in your class and she told me all about it.”

  Bells were ringing in my head—danger bells. “Oh, right, that quiz. Well, I’m more than ready. I know ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ like my left hand.” That wonderful simile was possible only after significant Internet research. If I ever had to meet Rochelle’s roommate, I’d have to read about every book and poem on the course.

  “Well, good luck with the quiz. See you Friday about seven.”

  Okay, I admit I was getting a little nervous about all this. A roommate in my non-existent English class; a quiz on Romantic poets I had never read. But I wasn’t ready to give up. I had no alternatives, really, and this thing with Rochelle was still going just fine—if you ignored a few potential glitches. Besides, there was her promise that we’d go out for a drink “or something.” Wasn’t “or something” exactly what I’d been looking for? Wasn’t the Ultimate Goal the point of all this?

  I mentioned to my parents that I’d be out on a date on Friday, and they seemed to respond with their usual generalized curiosity and wholesome advice. My mother is so hopelessly supportive of everything I do that I half expected her to offer me twenty bucks to cover the costs. But it was my father who surprised me.

  Thursday night, he came up behind me in the computer/TV/ everything room. Thankfully I was checking out Samuel Beckett, playwright, on the Internet rather than some porn site.

  “Sorry to interrupt, Al,” my dad said. “I can see you’re studying.”

  “Yeah, got a major test on this Beckett guy on Friday.”

  “Right,” he said, standing awkwardly at the door. “Mind if I talk to you for a minute?”

  This was truly strange, I thought. My dad never asked if he could talk to me. By and large, he didn’t talk to me unless he had to, and when he did, he never asked permission. But there he was, wearing one of those “dad” sweaters that my mother keeps buying him, shifting his weight from one foot to another.

  “No problem,” I told him.

  Dad kept looking at the floor or the computer screen, as if he were afraid to meet my eyes. For a second, I had this awful thought: my parents are going to get a divorce and he’s come to tell me. That must be it—just like on TV, except we didn’t have any sucky music in the background.

  “Al, it’s probably a little late to talk to you about this…,” he began.

  “Is it you and Mom?” I asked, my voice all scratchy.

  “Well, Mom and I have been talking,” he said, “and she thought I should talk to you about it.”

  By now I was really worried. “About what?”

  “About, uh, well, sex.”

  I let out a major sigh of relief. This wasn’t “the divorce talk”; it was “the birds and the bees talk.” I leaned back in my chair. “Well, we started talking about that in school about grade three,” I told him.

  My dad looked more embarrassed. “I know. But your mom and I notice that you’re going out a lot these days, and we thought, I mean, your mom thought I should talk to you about…protection.”

  “Protection?” My mind shifted to Val Halvorsen and his goons. I could use some protection from those guys.

  “It’s just that, sooner or later…and I hope it’s later…you’re going to be, uh, sexually active.”

  “Well, I hope so,” I said. Suddenly I felt very relaxed. My dad was so nervous that he managed to make me feel calm.

  “And you know there are a lot of diseases you can get from, well, doing it with people you don’t know…”

  “I’ve seen pictures,” I told him, which was true. We had a video in our biology class that was so graphic it would make any sensible person give up sex forever. Of course, teenagers aren’t all that sensible. Maybe if there were pictures of gonorrhea infections on beer bottles, like those cancer pictures on cigarette packs,
it would give us a whole generation of celibates.

  “Anyhow, I just wanted to tell you to be careful and give you this,” he said. He handed me a foil packet—a genuine lubricated condom. “And there’s a whole box in the downstairs bathroom, just in case you need more.”

  Wow, I thought, my parents must think I’m quite the stud muffin. My mouth dropped open.

  “Not that this gives you permission, you know. I mean, it’s not that we think sex before you make a serious commitment is a good idea.”

  My father seemed to be at a loss for words at this point, so I decided to help him out. “No, no, this is, like, just in case.”

  “Right, just in case.” And with that, my dad left.

  Just in case, I repeated to myself. Just in case I get laid…and maybe it’ll be tomorrow night!

  17

  A Little Culture Can Be Just Enough

  OKAY, SO MY BRAIN was kind of rushing ahead. Just because I had a condom didn’t mean I’d actually get to use it. I mean, I had been carrying a Trojan around in my wallet so long that the thing must be turning to dust. But now, courtesy of my parents, I had a brand-new condom—a lubricated condom—and access to a whole box of lubricated condoms!

  Thoughts like that can make a guy feel overwhelmed by parental affection. It was almost enough to make up for the fact that the girls at my school still looked on me like some kind of unpleasant crustacean, that the girls at St. Agnes would soon learn I couldn’t hold my liquor, that the gardener at the Hoskin mansion was probably grossed out by what he found on his lawn, and that my latest attempt at seduction was based on fraud and outright lies. At least, I said to myself, at least I have protection.

  And thanks to the Internet, I had information:

  Samuel Beckett. b. Dublin 1906, moved to Paris 1937, d. Paris, 1989, best known for the absurdist drama Waiting for Godot, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1969. Beckett’s literary works reduce basic existential problems to their essential elements—the frustration of life; the individual’s sense of loneliness, despair and alienation; the impossibility of establishing real communication with others; the mystery of identity. His works effectively depict the aridity of modern life.