Chapter XXXX: Nothing Compares 2 U
Part 3: Lovers
Chapter Forty: Nothing Compares 2 U
So if you put Boggs behind Gedman then you eliminate the possibility of the passed ball or wild pitch. That enables Stanley to really lean into it and throw some juice by Wilson. Because the run that must not score is the run that ties the game. That run can not cross the plate. I don't care if Buckner fields that ball and throws it into the dugout. That run means nothing. A Met was going to score no matter what. The Sox were going to pull off a miracle win in extra innings as the visiting team. That rarely happens. Almost never. Something about the final three outs makes them impossible to get. The home team, the home team in a World Series, can do anything with three outs. After 170 games, they believe they are unbeatable at home. The Mets were no different. So to go two runs up in the top of the tenth was a miracle, not that the Mets scored three in the bottom of the tenth. No one understands this. People think the Red Sox deserved to win, but no visiting team deserves anything. They have to claw for every run in other stadiums, especially in extra innings. Three runs is nothing. I've seen teams score three runs on four pitches. Three runs is a joke when your back is against the wall. In the ALCS the Angels were up three runs in the top of the ninth inning Then they were down by one run in the bottom of the ninth and came back to tie it off Schiraldi. See? Home teams are like crazy tigers.
There's no excuse, but you can't give up. You never say die. Never. Jim Rice gets a single in the top of the tenth and you have a three run rally with two outs. And Dewey was coming up next. See? It really isn't that hard, especially when you throw a wild pitch and make an error. The Mets didn't pull off a miracle comeback, they just pulled off a good comeback at a miraculous time.
I wasn't sure when Lacy had stopped listening to me and focused all her attention on The Sound of Music movie on television, but her blank expression, a definite lack of a certain zeal for discovery, indicated she had shoved off without me. I was trying, as I had for the past five years, to clarify my position, get my shine box in order, or, in the lingo of the Sixties, “turn people on to my trip”, but my seeds fell on concrete. Lacy had no interest in hearing about Boggs and Barrett combining for the two-out run. Though I considered this play as critical and strategic as Pickett's charge, most other H. Sapiens found it beyond trivial. That Buckner then got hit by a pitch and Rice flew out to end the inning ranked right up there with the theme song to Pee Wee's Playhouse in order of importance. And the fact that Dewey was on deck, a point I made sure to emphasize like a bishop quoting the bible, was like talking about names of stars that had not yet been discovered. Schiraldi's appearance from the dugout, something I routinely compared to seeing the sun rise in the west, was usually responded to with an arched eyebrow, an “Oh?” or totally dismissed. Lacy was no different.
“How was the drive down?” the Fair One asked in characteristic New Englandese. Her lingua added vowels and twists and clipped words until she sounded like a sea gull calling for a cracker. For instance, she managed to pronounce the word “Down” without using the letters “o”, “w”, or “n”. It came out of her ruby reds more like “Dah”. It was, nevertheless, music to my old vestible cachlea to hear Lacy ask, “Ya take the Mahss Pike, ya fak?”
Lacy liked to add this final title when addressing me. It was, I assume, meant to demonstrate her affection. It held a completely different meaning when, for instance, I would say to Cristo, “You fahkin’ fahk fahk. Dwight Evans didn't make no error on that Mookie Wilson single. Are you fahkin’ crazy, ya fahk?” I heard Lacy's words as another would hear, “Sweety” or “My love”
As to her actual question about whether I took the Mass Pike into Connecticut, I couldn't rightly say. One minute I had been on the asphalt, then I found Piper's apartment and immediately had tracked down the Brunette Babe. Highway titles had been the furthest thing from my mind, much less important than points on the compass; I had followed signs for southern cities, specifically Hartford, Connecticut. Fortunately, the car had cruise control. This feature was a little jumpy and would rapidly accelerate five to ten miles an hour, like punching an after-burner, when I engaged it, but once settled down it gave my gas pedal legs a rest and allowed me to doze off in the deserted slow lane and concentrate on listening to Cat Stevens and singing the theme to Pee Wee's Playhouse.
“I think so, babe,” I replied, slipping in my own nom d'amour. “I wasn't paying attention since everyone kept giving me the finger when they passed me. Isn't the speed limit forty-miles an hour anymore?”
“What did your father say?”
I imagined Cristo calling my house, inquiring about my availability for a Varsity Basketball game at BHHS.
“He's not here,” my father would say. “His car's gone and his backpack and his three sectional-staff are missing. Looks like he really went to Mexico.”
“But what about the court case? He can't just leave,” Cristo would argue like a no-life Greek gossip.
“Ogden,” my father would begin with an air of superiority and hard won wisdom, “is going to learn the hard way that if you can't play by the rules then you will pay the consequences.”
Maybe Cristo would agree with this infantile summation of life, maybe not, but no one would point out, as I would happily have done, that both of them apparently played by the rules and were no more or less satisfied with their lives than your average inmate in the Applenook County Jail. The consequences for “not playing by the rules” weren't much different than the consequences for treating the rule book like the gospel. Nothing guarantees happiness, least of all playing by the rules.
I could have taken their advice and turned around, but what fun would there be in that? It was better to elevate myself above my father and friends than believe their predictions were correct, that I would at best become an old man shuffling through the supermarket in his slippers, carrying Salisbury steak TV dinners and a bag of baby carrots back to his lonely cave, or else lead a life of crime and drugs and loose morals. The wolves were circling the fire, but I had my violin. Since Nero had fiddled while Rome burned, I felt I was in admirable company.
The chumps back in Bone Harbor claimed I saw the world in black or white, right or wrong. That was mostly true, but was it also possible that they saw my life, my choices, my mistakes in similar shades of black or white? Why would I either become a pariah or an anointed socialite. Even my High School guidance counselor had offered more choices than that. Wasn't it more likely that I would find myself at some juncture in the wilderness and rather than make the wrong choice, or even the right one, I would just let myself be led (by a woman, man, hunch) to begin one of those lives of quiet desperation that my boy Thoreau had warned me about 150 years ago? That fate seemed far more likely since few ever deviate from the middle of the road to either lead extravagant lives of crime or sloth, serial murderers, terrorists, politicians, shopping cart aluminum can collectors, or, conversely, to become humanitarians, activists, screenwriters, sought after pastry chefs. Why was it that if I chose to risk total anonymity and dissatisfaction then I would not, could not, actually succeed in being a painter or baseball historian or revered traveler (The 2.5% whose lives are discussed in magazines), but would instead become one of the 2.5% of the population in jail (Whose lives are discussed in court)? It was far more likely that my star would be named neither in the ultra-successful camp, nor in the profound failure camp, but rather remain unseen, a non-entity.
Around three hundred baseball players reach the Major League. Only forty or fifty of those in any given year are noteworthy. Only ten of those in any given decade are worth mentioning twice. A player like Dwight Evans was only respected as a right fielder compared to other right fielders. His statistics, contributions and presence on the field were slightly above average, and even I had to admit that in five years Dewey would be discussed no more frequently than Luis Rivera, Dave Sax, and Buddy Holly's drummer. If the above average players are resorted into categories of average and above average, then those are resorted, so on and so forth, only two players a year are inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Where was the risk that I would be anything but average and unmentioned, a non-factor in human history, neither a criminal nor a scientific mastermind? I was the first one to confess that obscurity wasn't the career I had aimed for as a wee pup, but the opportunity to become a master of Ninjitsu never seemed to present itself.
“My dad would just say I was crazy,” I put in. “Treats me like a bootblack, breaks my shine box. He doesn't know who I am, doesn't know Ray Knight. I played Whiffle ball with Gordy Clutcher. I got the high score on...”
Lacy cut me off. “Have you eaten anything? Your clothes are hanging off of you, Oggy.”
“I had some sunflower seeds on the trip here. Found them in Poncho's seat cushions.”
Lacy pointed to her kitchen. “Go get something from my sister's fridge. Go eat a sandwich or something. A fahkin’ apple. Please.”
“I never eat after dark. The ruin of civilization will come because people eat after dark. Late night Drive-thru windows. Donut shops. Tacos. It's death. Jesus didn't eat at a drive-thru window. Buddha didn't eat after dark.”
“You aren't Jesus, Oggy.”
“So I've been told. I bet they told Jesus that he wasn't Jesus, too.”
“I liked you better when I first met you,” said Lacy casually munching her words like gum. “You weighed more and you didn't look like an ape.”
Coming from my grandmother, such a comment would've warranted a response such as, “Could you hand me that crumpled up newspaper...oh, I'm sorry, that's your face.” Or “Let's see what's on television, maybe they made your house a historical landmark.”
But coming from a twenty-year old girl with smoldering eyes, eyelashes that would make Joan Collins clutch her purse enviously, and legs that belonged on stage, I was inclined to smile and say, “I've been sick. My father has something against replacing the canned Okra we brought back from New Mexico in 1975. Maybe he feels closer to my mother as long as he has food that expired before they got divorced. Did I mention he's nuts?”
“I didn't know you lived in New Mexico. How was that?”
Since I was still gnawing on my mammy's teat when I left, my memory was a bit stale. However, on the hitchhiking trip from California, the one I'd developed the three-part plan on, I'd paused under a highway overpass outside Albuquerque, my birthplace, to await a new ride or death, whichever bus stopped first. While I was idle, I checked out the environs. There was a mountain, sage brush, blue sky, asphalt, 110 degree heat. A thought had occurred to me that I had seen this before. Then I realized that it was not a natal memory, but the effects of twenty days on the side of the road waiting for a ride. I sensed little had changed in my seventeen year absence and expected to spend another seventeen years under the bridge, watching Progress march creep another step forward. In my journal I wrote, “Albuq. Hot. Ride w/ cowboy. Tired. North or East? Need H2O” Not exactly the outline of a novel. Then a jeep pulled over. The driver tumbled out and handed me the keys like we'd been expecting to meet here. Had I been drinking, he asked. No, I hadn't. In fact, my lips were beginning to feel like furry caterpillars. Good, said the driver. You can drive. My next journal note reads, “Goodbye Albuq. hello Denver. Feet hurt.”
“How was it? Nice. Perfect. You know, I was eating burritos more in Florida. That fattened me up. I was swimming to stay in shape and since it was warm I didn't have to have my beard.”
“You should shave. You look like a hobo, ya fak.”
Once again I felt an urge to mutter, “And you look like a hobo's withered grandmother,” but just chuckled and said, “I liked you more when I first met you too, Lacy. You didn't call me names and give me shit. Funny how that works.”
I watched Lacy's chin and lips tighten. She knew I was watching her. What she didn't know was that she was coming to Mexico with me. She would come to Mexico with me and she would like me as much as before. Maybe more.
“I called you names and gave you shit when we first met. Don't you remember?”
Remember? Did McNamara make a mistake when he let Schiraldi pitch the bottom of the tenth? As long as I had my hat I would never forget. I had met the Fairest Of Them All on my return visit from Florida, following my failed attempt to secure employment fighting fires in Kuwait and spread my three-part plan throughout the land. The career was a long shot, I knew, but I wouldn't go to the grave regretting the opportunities that passed me by. I had enough pain, the dull ache in my hip, the spasms in my back, the recurring acne and dandruff, without having missed my chance to get rich and retire young.
This chance passed me by while I played Volleyball on the beach with other surfers/students who only wanted to get high and wring a little passion from the asphalt and concrete before life got a good grip on their nuts. Among other things, they taught me to take what the world gives, to roll with the cheap shots, to bend like the palm tree and laugh like the gull. We all take turns at the business end of a nightstick, so just accept it, take another bong hit, and move on. Maybe an oil company would call, but probably not. However, on most nights the ocean will beat the frustration out of you. And if you go in naked and stoned there is a good chance you'll drown. So you fight for your life and come out covered in salty residue, tar on your feet, seaweed in your hair. No one is waiting for you by the lamp, no girl with wind-blown hair, no dog with a stick to fetch, no dealer with a bag of pills, not even the cops with a trespassing ticket. The tide took your flip flops away...again. It's just you and the sand and sea and you are a little bit happy that you aren't in an ambulance or hearse or clinging to a channel buoy as the strength slips from your cramped fingers. You aren't sure what you won, but you feel victorious. So you go get a piece of pizza and before you go to sleep you play with yourself. Why not?
Sage advice? You decide.
The money that I'd been expecting from Vance, 35 of the best, my half of the car, never arrived. Nor did checks from my parents or job offers or even a half price coupon to the local animal park. Nothing came in the mail. I sent out letters to Erin, Cristo, Hunter Thompson, and others, but they never wrote back. So I took my last forty dollars and bought a bus ticket to Connecticut.
I spent a night in a donut diner after giving my last five dollars to a woman who promised to drive me the fifteen miles to UCONN. She took my money to “get gas for her car” and she never came back. It was cold outside, wet, close to snowing. There was no ocean anymore so I sat with a man who told stories about a war I'd watched in movies. I fell asleep during his stories and he left. Another man came in and asked me why I was there. Because Calvin Shiraldi threw a 0-2 floater to Ray Knight, I told him.
“Three singles in a row. Three singles, a wild pitch and an error. Three runs in the bottom of the tenth inning. Five years later I'm stranded in an all night donut shop crying in my coffee because some whore took my last five bucks.”
“She say she was going to get gas?”
Gas. Yes. The bitch.
“You aren't the first. Boy was in here two weeks ago, same story. Except for the baseball part.”
“That doesn't make me feel like any less of an asshole.”
“Well, that's because it doesn't make you any less of one.”
Maybe he believed my story. I didn't ask. He gave me five dollars to get out of town, or at least out of the donut shop. In exchange, he explained that he'd just had back surgery, but he said it hadn't helped. Every time he bent over to pick up the paper his back hurt in the same place.
“Everyone has some pain that won't go away,” I said before walking back to the bus station.
I fell asleep in the bus terminal and got the business end of the nightstick across my feet. I told the badge that I couldn't buy the ticket to UCONN without two more bucks. I'd tried to make a few bucks in the bathroom, but gave up after giving a guy a hand job and then having to pay two bucks. Then I'd played harmonica--making only a dollar plus a prayer book that told me I was on the express elevator to hell--until security told me to stop. I was shivering in my Bermuda shirt and shorts. My balls had crawled way up in there and I was still two bucks short of the Hartford departure fee.
Amazingly, the badge gave me the rest of the money and I snagged a ticket to UCONN. As we were pulling out of the terminal I saw the chick who'd taken my money at the donut shop. She was bouncing in that speed freak sort of way, talking to another guy with a backpack, running her good hustle. It wasn't a great hustle, but I'd been tired and out of options at the time she stung me. Like McNamara, I'd taken a chance and got beat.
I knocked hard on the bus window. Nothing. The bus turned closer to her. I knocked again. Hard. She looked up. I knew the windows were tinted so I got real close to the glass and flipped up on long middle finger at her and then mouthed, “You Fahking Thieving Cunt” slowly, slowly and silently, and with great pleasure even though it was another long shot that she could read lips, the illiterate slut. She was about to return the bird to me with some clever Hartford ghetto slang, but I didn't give her the chance. I leaned back and stretched my legs, rubbed my balls loose, farted. I'd done something right to be here. The bus picked up speed and found the highway. In a nearby seat was a cute college girl on her way back to UCONN, pretending to read a text book, cute and dressed real nice with a good head of hair. I licked my lips. The bell rang. It was a new round.
“I'm no different now, Lace. It was only a few months ago. Remember the dorm? We never had it so good.”
“I still live there. You were nice then. You didn't talk about the Red Sox so much. What happened?”
“I told you Bone Harbor is cursed. I go back there and it's death. Ray Knight breaks my shine box. My father pisses in my milk bowl. Gary Carter keeps me up at night. My old radio station, WHEB, plays complete shit now. Total shit! I'd kill to hear Dream Academy, but all they play is Wet Wet Wet and Boys II Men. It drove me nuts. I got fahked on all sides.”
“Don't be vulgar.”
Vulgar? Dorm life was like high octane vulgarity. You couldn't take two steps in the hallways without being vulgar. It was a big joke to see who could the most vulgar. Of course, I had also been in the courtship phase then, presenting my best side so Lacy would at least know it existed, even if it went into hiding immediately following sex. She knew this, was way ahead of me in that department, but I was just doing as I was taught regarding courtship. First you be who they want you to be: their father. Then you try to be who they will tolerate: their drunk father. If they are still around for stage three then you're in trouble. You swear, scratch you balls, pick your nose, leave dishes in the sink, never cook or make the bed, swear, ignore their monthly complaints, etc. But they hang around like the cat you tried to get to shut up with a bowl of milk. Next thing you know you have two cats. So you go back to who you have always been, who you masked at first, diluted second, but now you can't even recognize yourself. That's how the babes get you.
On our first meeting, Lacy had walked into Piper's room just as I was demonstrating the proper form for lighting a three foot long water bong. She watched patiently for about ten seconds, and after she had surveyed my Key West palm frond sombrero, my mended flip flops, by braided and beaded hair, she asked who I was.
“Piper's oldest friend in the world,” I coughed. “My name is Ogden. You may call me Oggy, as in 'Oggy, does this thong make me look sexy?'“
She didn't react, but merely asked, “Oggy?”
“Oh, yes...wait,” I addressed the kids in front of me on the rug, “Hold it down there so the smoke doesn't get out. There you go.” Then I gazed at the dark haired wonder and asked, “What's your name, my pretty?”
Normally, I would stare into the carpet and rub my hands together and act like a retard, but a few puffs of Colombia's finest had me thinking outside the box, so to speak. My identity, the old roles I normally played, seemed silly. Not to mention the months in Florida where I had enjoyed a vacation from Bonigan's reinforcement of said roles.
“Why don't you come over here, girlfriend. Keep Oggy company.”
“I'm fine here,” said the sleek brunette. “My name is Lacy Kirschinbaum, see? Not 'Pretty.' You may call me Lacy, as in 'Can I get you another pint of ice cream, Lacy?'“
Lacy's voice was the equivalent of hands on hips, but I felt sharp. Lacy looked like a ripe sexual grape. Her hair was a delicious dark chocolate, unlike the sun bleached butterscotch-rave-heads I'd met in Florida, or the platinum-haired, paisley-robbed starlets bopping around California. This chick had that extra 5%.
She asked, “Where does someone like you live?”
Someone like me? This sentence construction could be taken many ways. I chose to interpret it thusly: “Where does someone as good looking as you live?' My mother always said to look for the positive side in everything.
“Well Lacy, I live under bushes, in cars, in donut shops. You know I got mugged in Hartford? Ask Piper.”
“Right. How do you eat?”
“I steal food from the Taco bell dumpster, obviously. I'm a vegetarian so it takes some work.”
“Where do you get your protein? You're thin as a fak.”
This showed that she'd read up on the subject of vegetarianism, unlike my pre-war grandparents.
“Sometimes I cheat,” I said, “and eat chicken flavored Ramen noodles. Listen, Lace, by any chance do you have seven really short friends, names of Sleepy, Sneezy, Grumpy and so on?”
This was by far my smoothest line, with the punch-line 'Because you are the fairest one in the land,” but Lacy ignored the bait like a Rainbow Trout shuns an Electric Creeper lure.
“So,” she summed up, “you're a stinking hobo who drinks and smokes pot...like a loser?”
Not exactly a stunning vita, but in the ballpark.
“Yeah, I guess you've known me for fifteen seconds, so go ahead and piss in my face, Lacy. I'm a stinking hobo who drinks and smokes pot. Yes, that's it. I just crawled out from under Piper's futon mattress and started to drink and smoke pot. Right guys?”
The bright and eager minds with their lips wrapped around the business end of a Hookah pipe all nodded in response to a question they hadn't even heard.
“I do many things, Lace. I'm a joker; I'm a smoker; I'm a midnight toker. I do things that you could only dream of, sister. When you are curled up in your Smurf pajamas, and you have your stuffed animals around your head and your pictures of you ex-boyfriends on your desk and your journal filled with half-truths, my shinebox and I are on the streets where the monkeys run wild.”
Lacy crossed her arms and leaned against the doorframe as I tried to remember what her original question was.
“But I don't drink unless I want to punish myself.”
“Why?”
I thought the answer was obvious. Alcohol is poison. Why else would I drink poison?
“A poetic question, Lace. One I've asked myself on occasion. Why did Schiraldi throw an 0-2 pitch over the plate? Why did Stanley unleash a pitch that missed its target by two feet? Why did ABBA break up? The answer is ever elusive.”
“But why?”
Tenacious little minx, I thought.
“I don't want to. Why toy around with booze? Booze just messes with your pleasure centers. Numbs them. Peyote actually dissolves your identity. Do you want to dissolve your identity with me, Lace?”
“Where do you sleep at night?”
I'd been asked fewer questions during the Celebration Graduation investigation.
“Who cares? In the bushes where the cops can't see. Where else?”
“What does your mother think of this?”
A Psychology major. Nice. What should I say? My mother? Don't talk about her. Don't you mention my mother in this dirty place. She's better than you, she's better than all of you. Or Mommy? My momma? She loves Ogden. She loves her Oggy no matter what he does. He's a good boy. Yes. Ogden is a good boy, isn't he mum? Mummy? Don't hit me again. I'll wash the sheets. Yes.
“My mother thinks I am a genius. Don't you?”
“What does your father think of this?”
That one was easy.
“My father has unresolved issues from his childhood.”
“Don't you get lonely sometimes?”
Get lonely? Did the Buddha get lonely? Did Jack Kerouac get lonely? Did Daryl Hall get lonely without John Oates? Of course. More accurately, I sometimes got not lonely.
“I talk to John Galt, my imaginary friend. Would you like to meet him?”
Lacy shook her pretty hair.
“How do you get from place to place?”
“I hitchhike. I put my thumb out and people stop and I get in their car and they take me somewhere. Or else I get on a bus full of smelly strangers with birth defects and social problems. How about you? How do you get places?”
“I drive. Is that why you're limping and using that cane?”
To answer this question I had to rearrange myself on Piper's futon couch. The room was suddenly stuffy, so I told the children to take the bong to another room. After they shuffled out, I stood up with the help of my walking stick. The months in Florida had improved my condition, but not cured me completely of the 1986 scars. I was starting to believe I would limp for the rest of my life, or until I could solve the Game Six puzzle. I stood next to the window and gave Lacy a good window shop.
Lacy was near the open door, ready to bolt, leaning. She was wearing 1988 fashions, namely pinstripe jeans with a tapered leg, brown penny loafers, white blouse with an upturned collar, a pink polka dot bow on the right side of her head. She cut a stunning figure. I couldn't help notice that she was checking out my Hawaiian shorts, surfer shirt and cleverly mended flip flops. My palm frond hat was the creme broule of my outfit.
Back to her question: why was I using the cane. I wanted to explain myself clearly the first time since, in my experience, it was at this juncture that my relationships became strained. Sure, Lacy was as smoking as Samantha Fox, but I'd learned to have some respect for myself, or at least how to fake it. I couldn't just say what she wanted to hear, so I spoke very clearly, like a kitchen boss speaking to his soggy socked illegal dishwasher from El Salvador. My lips felt like inflated balloons. Had I been smoking cow dung?
“I limp, Lacy, because Calvin Schiraldi threw a pipe fastball to Ray Knight on an 0-2 pitch. That sissy bitch destroyed my life with the last pitch he threw as a real man. And my walking staff is Alaskan Willow. See? Diamond Willow. Very rare. And hitchhiking will save the world.”
Lacy squinted for signs that I was trying to put one over on her. The simple country folk are often struck by the seamless clarity of my three-part plan. Lacy was no different.
“Save the world? You think you're Flash Gordon?”
A sense of humor. Always nice to find.
“Yeah. Silly me. You know the Exxon Valdez accident?”
“In Alaska?”
“It was all my fault.”
“How did you cause the Exxon Valdez accident?”
I smacked my head. Once again, I'd lost another one. As many times as I did this, I couldn't seem to get someone on my side the first time through.
“Because I wasn't hitchhiking, of course. And I wasn't naked. How else? Are you not paying attention or did I leave something out?”
Just when most people turn tail and head for the hills, Lacy took a step into the room. I love the way some girls move, like a dance. Lacy was the queen of them all when it came to walking. Darcy now seemed like a clumping linebacker in comparison. Rose McCorley, whose approach made my eyes bulge, could have taken lessons from Lacy. When a pitcher gets into a groove, like when Clemens struck out 20 Mariners in 1986, his mechanics transcend baseball. Lacy looked like that.
Then, like a court appointed psychologist, Lacy proceeded to pick my worldview, made vulnerable by the closet grown pot I'd just smoked, apart. When the interview was over, I hardly knew anything about Lacy, but she knew practically everything about me. She knew I felt responsible for the breakup of Wham! She knew I'd come close but had not actually engaged in sex while at the beloved alma mater, and that I considered myself a partial failure because of this. She knew I dreamed of striking out Ray Knight with a curveball in the dirt. She also deduced that my political stance was mostly talk and when faced with a true crisis I would most likely run for the hills. She even sat patiently while I gave a detailed explanation of each face on the 1986 Red Sox team photo. By the end of our talk, I was smitten.
She smiled when she left and said, “You're an interesting person, Oggy. I don't know what to think of you now. At first I thought you were a creep. They said that Piper had adopted a homeless person. You look like one of the bums begging for spare change in the Hartford bus terminal, but you're here in my dorm and you can talk and you have parents and a history you can remember.”
Well, it was an improvement on 'A hobo who drinks and smokes pot...like a loser,' but I still didn't foresee a wedding announcement going out with the morning mail. The observations that I could “talk and had parents and a history I could remember” were hardly stunning character strengths that would have Lacy calling her parents and saying, “I think I met The One.” Still, I had to persevere. Say what you will about my patre, but he didn't raise a quitter.
“Funny you should mention bums. I was actually begging for spare change in the Hartford Bus Terminal just a few days ago. It was because I was robbed. I've hitchhiked a thousand rides with the usual Jesus freaks and fags, all the way from Alaska to California to Virginia, but I take the bus one time and I get robbed. What does that tell you?”
“That you have your own way of looking at the world. You are kind of a selfish asshole, but it is only because you're inexperienced with people.”
I felt my stock falling.
“You're just untamed,” Lacy continued emotionlessly. “You have no social skills, but you might be human underneath this homeless front.” She cast a gray eye on my flip flops. “You've got the normal issues with your parents, but you amplify them so you think they're special, like you invented them.”
Then it hit me: She understood. I hadn't alienated another one. Yes, I have my own way of looking at the world. I live in my body every day and there is no getting out of it. I wake up and I have to make it to the end of the day just like everyone else and nobody really cares if I get there. I'm unique but I'm not special. Despite all my ranting about Ray Knight, Lacy understood. After she left I wrote in my journal: “Met Lacy-psyche! The best legs and smart. Must be honest with her about Dewey and Fisk.”
Lacy returned hours later and allowed me to walk her to class. She walked and I floated. Thus, I became that guy I always wanted to be, walking the cute girl to class, a history of travel and adventure in my eyes, a unique way of living, a bewildering philosophy, a journal full of clever confessions and the observation that the world basically did not appreciate what I had to offer. But there's this one girl I just met...she understands about me...she knows Ray Knight...real hot...legs...eyes like Darcy...her name is...
Lacy. Who was I when I first met Lacy? As I sat next to her on the couch in her apartment, The Sound of Music unfolding on the television, I kept asking myself this question in an effort to recreate him, to reconstruct that winning personality. Where had the love gone? Had I been more funny or less self absorbed back in the springtime of our love? Did I ignore her more or flatter her with attention? Did I pay more attention to her friends? Did I pay more attention to Piper? Did I promise to introduce her to my sexy friends? I didn't know. Because “Courtship: Stage One” was false and hateful, I had no idea of how I had behaved. Now I was drying on the shore as the tide pulled back. As Kurt would say, I had screwed another pooch. Now the only thing I set ablaze when Lacy saw me was her sense of sarcasm. The chance for a hand job on her couch, some passionate petting in a hot tub, oral sex on Piper's dirty futon, tender intercourse in her candlelit bedroom, had passed. The bottle was empty. Game over. Fine. She was still coming to Mexico with me.
On the ride from New Hampshire I had decided that I would not go to Mexico alone. I was not going to cross the country again with a series of crazy road prophets as commentators. Lacy would come with me and there would be no argument. There would be no argument because I wasn't going to ask her. I was going to take her. Something precious had to be sacrificed for Schiraldi to get that 0-2 pitch past Knight. An adolescence of loyalty and grief had apparently not been enough to secure the Big Win. But there were other things, other people, who I could offer in tribute. I wasn't going to kidnap Lacy; I was going to liberate her. The only question was how to get her into the car.
“We have a good life,” I mused from the couch, “I like how we live. I like sitting with you, looking at you, listening to you breathe. We're healthy, you know. Comparatively speaking, we're doing pretty good. We could have a kid you and me. We could have ten kids. Rob banks. Make pottery. Go to Mexico.”
“How's Cans?”
Of course she'd ask about Piper. She'd only known him for two years and I'd known him for a hundred. Lacy could only dream of my history with Piper, the Smear the Queer challenges, the Kickball tournaments, the head-first slides, the Basketball games, the High School hallway jousts and jeers. I wasn't Piper's closest friend, or even his closest admirer, but I knew him.
After Schiraldi did what he shouldn't have done, Piper, that model Sophomore who turned in all his homework assignments and refused to participate in the pizza-hucking contest held every Thursday at lunch, found me at my secret hideout under the Football bleachers and said, “Tough break, Oggy. You win some and you lose some. Maybe next year,”
Tough break? I was suddenly crippled on my right side and he calls that a tough break? Dewey drove a knife into my heart and pounced on it with his steel cleats and Piper calls it a tough break? I lay in a brain dead trance for three days as Schiraldi drilled me in the nuts and he calls it a tough break? Really? As I watched him take the court for basketball, I thought, I'll show you a tough break. While Cristo was doing the wave in the half-filled bleachers, I was silently praying Piper would break his ankle or something equally devastating. Maybe he would lose control of the ball in the final seconds. That would be a tough break. Too bad. Rotten luck. Better luck next year, Mr. Tough Break.
“He's Piper,” I told Lacy. “His shit doesn't stink. He's always one step ahead of me. You know when the Sox lost he said 'Tough break.' That was it. He didn't care about me or my baby. He doesn't know Ray Knight. He lives in a clean little soap bubble. A perfect world. He'd throw a curveball in the dirt to Ray Knight. Of course. It's fun for him. He was good at everything. Do you know he ran track.”
I would stand behind trees in the forest near the BHHS athletic fields, with my shorts down, and watch Piper charge full speed around the track, a crimson blur. He was as unaware of my jealous eyes as he was of Darcy's sexy, stripper-like movements (The real reason I was there) as she stretched her powerful legs with Rose and the rest of the Girls Track team. While Piper rested with his hands on his knees after a triumphant 100-yard dash, and Darcy slowly bent over to touch her perfect toes, I humped a sugar pine. I groaned as my knees quivered, leaving me slumped and panting against the tree. My seed dripped sap-like down the rough gray bark as Darcy adjusted her blue spandex tights and I gasped as I saw her crotch press against the fabric. As the official results gave Piper first place I panted, “Do you love me, Darcy?” But the cheering crowd was too loud. Neither Piper nor Darcy could hear me. Darcy put her hands on her hips and I imagined they were my hands pulling her into my thrusts. I finally lost my grip on the tree, collapsing to the dirt moaning, “Darcy. I love you.” and massaging my inflamed prostate gland. Darcy was out of sight preparing for her race while Rose congratulated Piper with a tug on his ears. I tugged my fouled Bugle Boy cargo pants on and looked around to make sure I hadn't been observed. I was alone, as always. No forest nymph had appeared to pleasure me and give me bags of gold or a secret love potion I could slip in Darcy's boxed milk. I was alone and soon I would stumble back into the quiet forest where my secrets were safe, where I could curse humanity from the safety of my crooked plywood shack.
None of this was fit for Lacy's ears so I stuck to safe path.
“Piper is just perfect,” I grinned and then moved closer to Lacy. She eyed me sideways at first and then looked right at me, those black brown eyes, like a rabbit's, alert and shiny, staring at me.
“Why don't you like him.”
“Are you listening to me? I love him. Maybe too much. He doesn't do anything wrong. He's perfect. What? My first girlfriend used to look at me like that, like you're looking at me now.”
She was looking at me like I had eaten all the leftover Chinese food and then lied about it.
“When was that? In the jungle while you were smoking pot and getting high?”
No, it had been when I ate all the Chinese food and lied about it. But that was a defensive answer and if Lacy was going to respect me I needed to be aggressive.
“Do girls practice that look?”
“No, Oggy. It comes naturally when we get pissed off. It's genetic.”
“So you're mad? I come around here and I hit on you and you don't care. Then I make you mad. What am I doing? I should leave.”
“Maybe you should.”
She was supposed to say, “No, please don't go.”
“Why don't you go?”
“The same reasons I'm here. Love. Sadness. Sacrifice. A combination of all three. Who knows?”
“You don't know? You drive from New Hampshire to see me and you don't know if you're happy or sad or in love? How many more days of 8th grade can you miss and still pass?”
I groaned. Leave it to a girl to twist my words around.
“Lace, you look just like Donna Reed right after Jimmy Stewart gets mad and yells at the kids. Remember? He kicks the models of the bridge and the city and all the kids get scared and start to cry. Then he tries to apologize but only makes things worse. You look just like Mary. Beautiful and angry, but torn between two conflicting choices.”
“What are you talking about, Oggy?”
“Let's go up to Bedford Falls and walk barefoot across the meadow. We'll watch the sun come up and then we'll walk down and the whole town'll be talkin' about us. It'll be a scnadal.”
Lacy stared at me as though waiting for the punch line.
“It's a Wonderful Life. You're Mary and I'm George. See...”
“I know the movie, ya fak.”
Lacy pulled her legs under her, which is something I love to watch, something so sexy in a Boxing Helena sort of way. She clutched a couch pillow and said without turing, “Watch the movie Oggy.”
If you've been paying attention then you know the movie was The Sound of Music. If you haven't been paying attention then I guess you're just better than me. You think my tale of love and obsession is beneath you. Maybe you would prefer I just tell you the end right now and save us both some time? Well, tough luck. You bought the ticket and you'll have to stay on until the ride stops. Put the water bong down and concentrate. I'm working my ass off here.
As I was saying before I had to throttle some of my duller audience members out of their drug induced daze, The Sound of Music was jogging along in full techno-colorific beauty. I felt the warmth of a Swiss summer pour into me and ease the cold from my fingers.
“Did you put this on for me?” I asked hoping she would say, “Yes, Oggy. Your happiness is my first priority.”
“No, ya fak. I happen to like it. I like things too.”
“You are very pretty, Lace,” I served up in the hopes I could steer the conversation onto the topic: sex, sub topic: Lacy and Oggy. “Very singular,” I added.
“Thank you, Oggy.”
“You are prettier than Julie Andrews. Even prettier than she was fifty years ago or whenever this was filmed.”
“But she can dance and sing.”
“You can sing and dance as good as she can.”
“No.”
I listened to Julie sing “Doe a deer, a female deer”. The lyrics were so spirited and the singing was so energetic and the dancing was so joyful and the acting was so convincing that I said, “This is the greatest movie I have ever seen.”
“Haven't you seen this before?”
“I don't think so. I would have remembered this part. This is great! Brilliant! It's almost as good as It's a Wonderful Life.”
“Settle down, ya fak. It is just getting started.”
And she was right. The movie is a flawless combination of lovable characters, compelling drama, dynamic musical performances and a fast plot set in the beautiful Alps. Dynamite. It wasn't pornographic and I still loved it. Like a Hoover does to dirt, it sucked me in.
“Lace, I want to go Switzerland with you. Forget Mexico.”
“Ok.”
I told her that I was serious, opposed to my normally lighthearted and frivolous frame of mind.
“Let's go.”
“Alright. See, all we needed was a little bonding over The Sound of Music and we understand each other. We're going to the Alps!”
I yodeled.
“I think we've always understood each other,” said Lacy with a Kathleen Turner throaty-ness in her voice. She added “Ya fak,” as an afterthought.
“Really? Always? Then who's Ray Knight?”
“The monster under your bed.”
I was astonished. Normally someone said Ray Knight was the Mets shortstop, or a member of Nixon's cabinet, or some other admission of ignorance.
“Yes! You are the first person to get that right. You and Toddy Bonigan understand. Ray Knight is the monster under my bed. But I know how to get rid of him. I know things too.”
I was quiet until Julie Andrews started singing a familiar song, like a memory of a cloud. I knotted my brow.
“I've heard this one before. I recognize this.”
“Then you must have seen the movie. It's my favorite,” said Lacy.
“No, I've heard this one years ago. A lifetime ago. Where was it?”
“Brown paper packages tied up with string. These are a few of my favorite things.” Lacy's voice brought it all back to me.
“Holy Von Trapp Family Singers! For the last sixteen years I thought my mother wrote this song. She used to sing it when we lived in Maine. I must have been three or four years old. This is one of the first songs I remember hearing. I probably heard this in the crib. Shit. It's just been downhill ever since. Having my mother sing this song to me in the crib when I was one year old...that was the high point of my whole life.”
Lacy opted not to analyze this revealing comment and instead sang the rest of the song in an effortless soprano voice as sweet as the Vermont maple syrup from my mother's birthplace. I wished I was four years old again and living in rural Maine with my parents, eating skillet fried flapjacks with butter and real syrup, falling into piles of leaves, climbing trees, scraping my knee, learning to read. Every October my mother, brother and I would carve intricate shapes in pumpkins and pick apples and make pies while my father raked all the leaves in the yard into a big pile we could jump into. In the Winter we would build snowmen and slide down the hill made by the plow as my mother baked muffins and steamed milk for cocoa in the fire warmed house. In the Spring the lilac bushes would bloom deep purple and I would practice hitting a big white ball off a plastic tee. In the Summer we would watch fireflies in the absence of city lights and look for shooting stars through the dense forest canopy. There is no time like Childhood...even Childhood.
“Lace? What are your favorite things?”
I silently prayed she would say, “Sex with Oggy,” but was dashed again.
“Hellos,” she said without pause. “New people who like to share their thoughts. Wood fires. My dogs. Silk. Dancing. The moon. Music. Did I say my dogs? I love my dogs. You should meet them. My Mom. My Dad. My sister. Good mini blinds. Perfume. Sight. Flannel sheets. I love apple cider in October. I love sexy men who smell good and can dance and have nice thick lips like yours when you shave.”
She paused to catch her breath. I had never seen her so eager to talk.
“I think Rodgers and Hammerstein would have had trouble rhyming 'Mini blinds' and 'flannel sheets.”
She smiled without showing her teeth and looked like Donna Reed on the Bailey's honeymoon, when she stood before the fireplace in 320 Sycamore, with the posters of exotic places, aglow in womanly magic and love. Glowing.
“I like cream colored ponies and crisp apple strudel too.”
“Lace, I love to hear you sing. My mother used to sing this song to me. She knew all the words and I thought she made it up because they were all her favorite things too. Maybe she did make Schnitzel but I thought it was spaghetti. You know what I think of when the Dogs bite and the bees sting?”
“The Red Sox?”
“Close. My playroom in Maine. My mother painted the ocean on the walls and I had all my stuffed animals. I mean, I had them and could keep them all together. And we had sock puppets with the little google eyes sewn on and felt tongues and I had control of it all. I could put the stuffed animals in a row and they wouldn't go anywhere and the ocean never moved. Everything was right.”
I hadn't thought about my playroom in Maine in ten years and was lost for a moment in the fragments of what I wanted to remember.
“If you could have anything, what would it be, Lace? You want me to shave? I'll do it. Anything.”
“I want my dad to stay home more.”
“Alright, anything but that. Name something else. Anything. I promise.”
“I want my mom to be happy.”
Strike two.
“Anything but those two things. Come on. Give me a chance.”
“I don't want anything else.”
Lacy sadly blinked her Joan Collins lashes and raised a plucked eyebrow at me. We studied each other for a moment. Did she think I looked like George Bailey when he gazed at Mary across the dance floor at the high school? Once could hope. She turned back toward the TV.
“If you come to Switzerland with me, I will carve out a good life for us. I promise.”
“Make it here.”
“What? Make what here? Brownies?”
“Carve your good life here at UCONN. I want you to stay. Don't leave.”
It was the first time anyone had said those two simple words. Don't leave. Cristo had just told me I was stupid and that I couldn't miss watching Roger Clemens open up the 1992 season, or I'd miss the start of the BHHS baseball season. He never said that he wanted me to stay. Even my father had just tried to dissuade me by predicting disasters like my being briefly happy. I had assumed my role in all this boy/girl/Timewraith drama was as the traveler, the vagabond, the clown, the one who sacrificed his stability to explore. How else would my three-part plan ever get from one place to another? I figured that as long as I viewed myself as a character in a pulp fiction novel, I was fine.
The Timewraiths had trained me well, but Lacy was suggesting I trade my walking staff for something as risky as a possible relationship. Such a line buggled everything up, but it also made me believe she wouldn't struggle to much when I took her to Mexico. Was it really that much different than college? Wasn't a roof still a roof, a car still a car, a gang of street children still a field trip? Seriously.
“Stay here, Oggy. Enroll at UCONN. Take classes. Paint. You don't have to go to Switzerland or Mexico.”
“But you could come. Just look at it like an arranged marriage, like in Fiddler on The Roof. You're Jewish. You could say we were arranged by Dwight Evans. Together we could beat the Mets.”
Lacy looked at the ceiling and sighed, “Do you even care how crazy you sound?”
Back in T.S.O.M., Mother Superior was telling the flibbertygibbet to climb ev'ry mountain after she tried to be a nun again. Alas, some people were meant for the cloister and some were meant to marry their employer and smuggle his nine dysfunctional kids into Austria. How come some weren't meant to join their strange bearded friend for a trip to Mexico?
“No, Oggy, the movie has nothing to do with your decision. You are free to stay or leave. It is up to you.”
Free? Something about that term made me wonder why I was going to Mexico in the first place. If I was free then why did I have to force Lacy to come with me? Why not just stay in Connecticut, fail some more classes, give Lacy hickies, play intramural soccer, get stoned between classes. The rest of the civilized world was doing it. Why not me? Then I groaned as I pictured Rene crying in my hallway.
“Actually...”
Somehow, the females of our fine species were given a sixth sense that helps them identify malingerers like myself. If my beard, Red Sox hat, and graffiti covered car weren't enough, I also apparently emanated an aura of disrepute that had just hit Lacy like the S. hits the F.
“What, Oggy. What did you do? You did something bad. I can tell.”
“I can't say. Piper told me not to confess.”
“Cans? Was he in on it? He'll tell me.”
She reached for the phone. I tried to pull her back, but she swatted my hand and nearly broke it. I realized suddenly that she could kick my ass if she wanted to. In order to smuggle her 3000 miles into Mexico, I'd need a crash course in cleverness.
“No. Cans wasn't in on it. It was all me. You don't have to know. It isn't your business.”
These words fell on Lace like drawing a line in the dirt and telling Atilla the Hun, “That side is yours. This side is mine.”
“Then I'll call your dad. He'll tell me.”
She held up the phone as a threat, like George Bailey holding Mary's Hatch’s bathrobe hostage while she hid in the hydrangeas.
“Come on, Oggy. You tell me or I wake Dante Bleacher up and ask him. What did you do?”
Once again, I found myself spiraling into the thick stuff. I swear, if there's a hole out there I'll be the first to fall in it. Go ahead, dig a hole in your backyard and see if you don't wake up tomorrow morning with me in there. If not, just wait. I'll show up eventually.
“It's horrible, babe. I made such a mistake.”
“Don't “babe” me, Oggy. You aren't going to “babe” your way out of this. All the “babes” in the world won't make you less of a fahk.”
Less of a fahk? How much more ignominious could I get?
“But I've been sick lately. I've been out of my head. Ray Knight, he's the monster under my bed, you said it yourself. Why did Mac have to leave Schiraldi in? He already pitched two innings. Why? Look, this is Dave Henderson. He hit a home run in the tenth. And this is Bill Buckner...”
“Put your centerfold away. What was it, Oggy. Why aren't you free? Come on. What's the big mystery.”
Chapter Forty: Nothing Compares 2 U
So if you put Boggs behind Gedman then you eliminate the possibility of the passed ball or wild pitch. That enables Stanley to really lean into it and throw some juice by Wilson. Because the run that must not score is the run that ties the game. That run can not cross the plate. I don't care if Buckner fields that ball and throws it into the dugout. That run means nothing. A Met was going to score no matter what. The Sox were going to pull off a miracle win in extra innings as the visiting team. That rarely happens. Almost never. Something about the final three outs makes them impossible to get. The home team, the home team in a World Series, can do anything with three outs. After 170 games, they believe they are unbeatable at home. The Mets were no different. So to go two runs up in the top of the tenth was a miracle, not that the Mets scored three in the bottom of the tenth. No one understands this. People think the Red Sox deserved to win, but no visiting team deserves anything. They have to claw for every run in other stadiums, especially in extra innings. Three runs is nothing. I've seen teams score three runs on four pitches. Three runs is a joke when your back is against the wall. In the ALCS the Angels were up three runs in the top of the ninth inning Then they were down by one run in the bottom of the ninth and came back to tie it off Schiraldi. See? Home teams are like crazy tigers.
There's no excuse, but you can't give up. You never say die. Never. Jim Rice gets a single in the top of the tenth and you have a three run rally with two outs. And Dewey was coming up next. See? It really isn't that hard, especially when you throw a wild pitch and make an error. The Mets didn't pull off a miracle comeback, they just pulled off a good comeback at a miraculous time.
I wasn't sure when Lacy had stopped listening to me and focused all her attention on The Sound of Music movie on television, but her blank expression, a definite lack of a certain zeal for discovery, indicated she had shoved off without me. I was trying, as I had for the past five years, to clarify my position, get my shine box in order, or, in the lingo of the Sixties, “turn people on to my trip”, but my seeds fell on concrete. Lacy had no interest in hearing about Boggs and Barrett combining for the two-out run. Though I considered this play as critical and strategic as Pickett's charge, most other H. Sapiens found it beyond trivial. That Buckner then got hit by a pitch and Rice flew out to end the inning ranked right up there with the theme song to Pee Wee's Playhouse in order of importance. And the fact that Dewey was on deck, a point I made sure to emphasize like a bishop quoting the bible, was like talking about names of stars that had not yet been discovered. Schiraldi's appearance from the dugout, something I routinely compared to seeing the sun rise in the west, was usually responded to with an arched eyebrow, an “Oh?” or totally dismissed. Lacy was no different.
“How was the drive down?” the Fair One asked in characteristic New Englandese. Her lingua added vowels and twists and clipped words until she sounded like a sea gull calling for a cracker. For instance, she managed to pronounce the word “Down” without using the letters “o”, “w”, or “n”. It came out of her ruby reds more like “Dah”. It was, nevertheless, music to my old vestible cachlea to hear Lacy ask, “Ya take the Mahss Pike, ya fak?”
Lacy liked to add this final title when addressing me. It was, I assume, meant to demonstrate her affection. It held a completely different meaning when, for instance, I would say to Cristo, “You fahkin’ fahk fahk. Dwight Evans didn't make no error on that Mookie Wilson single. Are you fahkin’ crazy, ya fahk?” I heard Lacy's words as another would hear, “Sweety” or “My love”
As to her actual question about whether I took the Mass Pike into Connecticut, I couldn't rightly say. One minute I had been on the asphalt, then I found Piper's apartment and immediately had tracked down the Brunette Babe. Highway titles had been the furthest thing from my mind, much less important than points on the compass; I had followed signs for southern cities, specifically Hartford, Connecticut. Fortunately, the car had cruise control. This feature was a little jumpy and would rapidly accelerate five to ten miles an hour, like punching an after-burner, when I engaged it, but once settled down it gave my gas pedal legs a rest and allowed me to doze off in the deserted slow lane and concentrate on listening to Cat Stevens and singing the theme to Pee Wee's Playhouse.
“I think so, babe,” I replied, slipping in my own nom d'amour. “I wasn't paying attention since everyone kept giving me the finger when they passed me. Isn't the speed limit forty-miles an hour anymore?”
“What did your father say?”
I imagined Cristo calling my house, inquiring about my availability for a Varsity Basketball game at BHHS.
“He's not here,” my father would say. “His car's gone and his backpack and his three sectional-staff are missing. Looks like he really went to Mexico.”
“But what about the court case? He can't just leave,” Cristo would argue like a no-life Greek gossip.
“Ogden,” my father would begin with an air of superiority and hard won wisdom, “is going to learn the hard way that if you can't play by the rules then you will pay the consequences.”
Maybe Cristo would agree with this infantile summation of life, maybe not, but no one would point out, as I would happily have done, that both of them apparently played by the rules and were no more or less satisfied with their lives than your average inmate in the Applenook County Jail. The consequences for “not playing by the rules” weren't much different than the consequences for treating the rule book like the gospel. Nothing guarantees happiness, least of all playing by the rules.
I could have taken their advice and turned around, but what fun would there be in that? It was better to elevate myself above my father and friends than believe their predictions were correct, that I would at best become an old man shuffling through the supermarket in his slippers, carrying Salisbury steak TV dinners and a bag of baby carrots back to his lonely cave, or else lead a life of crime and drugs and loose morals. The wolves were circling the fire, but I had my violin. Since Nero had fiddled while Rome burned, I felt I was in admirable company.
The chumps back in Bone Harbor claimed I saw the world in black or white, right or wrong. That was mostly true, but was it also possible that they saw my life, my choices, my mistakes in similar shades of black or white? Why would I either become a pariah or an anointed socialite. Even my High School guidance counselor had offered more choices than that. Wasn't it more likely that I would find myself at some juncture in the wilderness and rather than make the wrong choice, or even the right one, I would just let myself be led (by a woman, man, hunch) to begin one of those lives of quiet desperation that my boy Thoreau had warned me about 150 years ago? That fate seemed far more likely since few ever deviate from the middle of the road to either lead extravagant lives of crime or sloth, serial murderers, terrorists, politicians, shopping cart aluminum can collectors, or, conversely, to become humanitarians, activists, screenwriters, sought after pastry chefs. Why was it that if I chose to risk total anonymity and dissatisfaction then I would not, could not, actually succeed in being a painter or baseball historian or revered traveler (The 2.5% whose lives are discussed in magazines), but would instead become one of the 2.5% of the population in jail (Whose lives are discussed in court)? It was far more likely that my star would be named neither in the ultra-successful camp, nor in the profound failure camp, but rather remain unseen, a non-entity.
Around three hundred baseball players reach the Major League. Only forty or fifty of those in any given year are noteworthy. Only ten of those in any given decade are worth mentioning twice. A player like Dwight Evans was only respected as a right fielder compared to other right fielders. His statistics, contributions and presence on the field were slightly above average, and even I had to admit that in five years Dewey would be discussed no more frequently than Luis Rivera, Dave Sax, and Buddy Holly's drummer. If the above average players are resorted into categories of average and above average, then those are resorted, so on and so forth, only two players a year are inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Where was the risk that I would be anything but average and unmentioned, a non-factor in human history, neither a criminal nor a scientific mastermind? I was the first one to confess that obscurity wasn't the career I had aimed for as a wee pup, but the opportunity to become a master of Ninjitsu never seemed to present itself.
“My dad would just say I was crazy,” I put in. “Treats me like a bootblack, breaks my shine box. He doesn't know who I am, doesn't know Ray Knight. I played Whiffle ball with Gordy Clutcher. I got the high score on...”
Lacy cut me off. “Have you eaten anything? Your clothes are hanging off of you, Oggy.”
“I had some sunflower seeds on the trip here. Found them in Poncho's seat cushions.”
Lacy pointed to her kitchen. “Go get something from my sister's fridge. Go eat a sandwich or something. A fahkin’ apple. Please.”
“I never eat after dark. The ruin of civilization will come because people eat after dark. Late night Drive-thru windows. Donut shops. Tacos. It's death. Jesus didn't eat at a drive-thru window. Buddha didn't eat after dark.”
“You aren't Jesus, Oggy.”
“So I've been told. I bet they told Jesus that he wasn't Jesus, too.”
“I liked you better when I first met you,” said Lacy casually munching her words like gum. “You weighed more and you didn't look like an ape.”
Coming from my grandmother, such a comment would've warranted a response such as, “Could you hand me that crumpled up newspaper...oh, I'm sorry, that's your face.” Or “Let's see what's on television, maybe they made your house a historical landmark.”
But coming from a twenty-year old girl with smoldering eyes, eyelashes that would make Joan Collins clutch her purse enviously, and legs that belonged on stage, I was inclined to smile and say, “I've been sick. My father has something against replacing the canned Okra we brought back from New Mexico in 1975. Maybe he feels closer to my mother as long as he has food that expired before they got divorced. Did I mention he's nuts?”
“I didn't know you lived in New Mexico. How was that?”
Since I was still gnawing on my mammy's teat when I left, my memory was a bit stale. However, on the hitchhiking trip from California, the one I'd developed the three-part plan on, I'd paused under a highway overpass outside Albuquerque, my birthplace, to await a new ride or death, whichever bus stopped first. While I was idle, I checked out the environs. There was a mountain, sage brush, blue sky, asphalt, 110 degree heat. A thought had occurred to me that I had seen this before. Then I realized that it was not a natal memory, but the effects of twenty days on the side of the road waiting for a ride. I sensed little had changed in my seventeen year absence and expected to spend another seventeen years under the bridge, watching Progress march creep another step forward. In my journal I wrote, “Albuq. Hot. Ride w/ cowboy. Tired. North or East? Need H2O” Not exactly the outline of a novel. Then a jeep pulled over. The driver tumbled out and handed me the keys like we'd been expecting to meet here. Had I been drinking, he asked. No, I hadn't. In fact, my lips were beginning to feel like furry caterpillars. Good, said the driver. You can drive. My next journal note reads, “Goodbye Albuq. hello Denver. Feet hurt.”
“How was it? Nice. Perfect. You know, I was eating burritos more in Florida. That fattened me up. I was swimming to stay in shape and since it was warm I didn't have to have my beard.”
“You should shave. You look like a hobo, ya fak.”
Once again I felt an urge to mutter, “And you look like a hobo's withered grandmother,” but just chuckled and said, “I liked you more when I first met you too, Lacy. You didn't call me names and give me shit. Funny how that works.”
I watched Lacy's chin and lips tighten. She knew I was watching her. What she didn't know was that she was coming to Mexico with me. She would come to Mexico with me and she would like me as much as before. Maybe more.
“I called you names and gave you shit when we first met. Don't you remember?”
Remember? Did McNamara make a mistake when he let Schiraldi pitch the bottom of the tenth? As long as I had my hat I would never forget. I had met the Fairest Of Them All on my return visit from Florida, following my failed attempt to secure employment fighting fires in Kuwait and spread my three-part plan throughout the land. The career was a long shot, I knew, but I wouldn't go to the grave regretting the opportunities that passed me by. I had enough pain, the dull ache in my hip, the spasms in my back, the recurring acne and dandruff, without having missed my chance to get rich and retire young.
This chance passed me by while I played Volleyball on the beach with other surfers/students who only wanted to get high and wring a little passion from the asphalt and concrete before life got a good grip on their nuts. Among other things, they taught me to take what the world gives, to roll with the cheap shots, to bend like the palm tree and laugh like the gull. We all take turns at the business end of a nightstick, so just accept it, take another bong hit, and move on. Maybe an oil company would call, but probably not. However, on most nights the ocean will beat the frustration out of you. And if you go in naked and stoned there is a good chance you'll drown. So you fight for your life and come out covered in salty residue, tar on your feet, seaweed in your hair. No one is waiting for you by the lamp, no girl with wind-blown hair, no dog with a stick to fetch, no dealer with a bag of pills, not even the cops with a trespassing ticket. The tide took your flip flops away...again. It's just you and the sand and sea and you are a little bit happy that you aren't in an ambulance or hearse or clinging to a channel buoy as the strength slips from your cramped fingers. You aren't sure what you won, but you feel victorious. So you go get a piece of pizza and before you go to sleep you play with yourself. Why not?
Sage advice? You decide.
The money that I'd been expecting from Vance, 35 of the best, my half of the car, never arrived. Nor did checks from my parents or job offers or even a half price coupon to the local animal park. Nothing came in the mail. I sent out letters to Erin, Cristo, Hunter Thompson, and others, but they never wrote back. So I took my last forty dollars and bought a bus ticket to Connecticut.
I spent a night in a donut diner after giving my last five dollars to a woman who promised to drive me the fifteen miles to UCONN. She took my money to “get gas for her car” and she never came back. It was cold outside, wet, close to snowing. There was no ocean anymore so I sat with a man who told stories about a war I'd watched in movies. I fell asleep during his stories and he left. Another man came in and asked me why I was there. Because Calvin Shiraldi threw a 0-2 floater to Ray Knight, I told him.
“Three singles in a row. Three singles, a wild pitch and an error. Three runs in the bottom of the tenth inning. Five years later I'm stranded in an all night donut shop crying in my coffee because some whore took my last five bucks.”
“She say she was going to get gas?”
Gas. Yes. The bitch.
“You aren't the first. Boy was in here two weeks ago, same story. Except for the baseball part.”
“That doesn't make me feel like any less of an asshole.”
“Well, that's because it doesn't make you any less of one.”
Maybe he believed my story. I didn't ask. He gave me five dollars to get out of town, or at least out of the donut shop. In exchange, he explained that he'd just had back surgery, but he said it hadn't helped. Every time he bent over to pick up the paper his back hurt in the same place.
“Everyone has some pain that won't go away,” I said before walking back to the bus station.
I fell asleep in the bus terminal and got the business end of the nightstick across my feet. I told the badge that I couldn't buy the ticket to UCONN without two more bucks. I'd tried to make a few bucks in the bathroom, but gave up after giving a guy a hand job and then having to pay two bucks. Then I'd played harmonica--making only a dollar plus a prayer book that told me I was on the express elevator to hell--until security told me to stop. I was shivering in my Bermuda shirt and shorts. My balls had crawled way up in there and I was still two bucks short of the Hartford departure fee.
Amazingly, the badge gave me the rest of the money and I snagged a ticket to UCONN. As we were pulling out of the terminal I saw the chick who'd taken my money at the donut shop. She was bouncing in that speed freak sort of way, talking to another guy with a backpack, running her good hustle. It wasn't a great hustle, but I'd been tired and out of options at the time she stung me. Like McNamara, I'd taken a chance and got beat.
I knocked hard on the bus window. Nothing. The bus turned closer to her. I knocked again. Hard. She looked up. I knew the windows were tinted so I got real close to the glass and flipped up on long middle finger at her and then mouthed, “You Fahking Thieving Cunt” slowly, slowly and silently, and with great pleasure even though it was another long shot that she could read lips, the illiterate slut. She was about to return the bird to me with some clever Hartford ghetto slang, but I didn't give her the chance. I leaned back and stretched my legs, rubbed my balls loose, farted. I'd done something right to be here. The bus picked up speed and found the highway. In a nearby seat was a cute college girl on her way back to UCONN, pretending to read a text book, cute and dressed real nice with a good head of hair. I licked my lips. The bell rang. It was a new round.
“I'm no different now, Lace. It was only a few months ago. Remember the dorm? We never had it so good.”
“I still live there. You were nice then. You didn't talk about the Red Sox so much. What happened?”
“I told you Bone Harbor is cursed. I go back there and it's death. Ray Knight breaks my shine box. My father pisses in my milk bowl. Gary Carter keeps me up at night. My old radio station, WHEB, plays complete shit now. Total shit! I'd kill to hear Dream Academy, but all they play is Wet Wet Wet and Boys II Men. It drove me nuts. I got fahked on all sides.”
“Don't be vulgar.”
Vulgar? Dorm life was like high octane vulgarity. You couldn't take two steps in the hallways without being vulgar. It was a big joke to see who could the most vulgar. Of course, I had also been in the courtship phase then, presenting my best side so Lacy would at least know it existed, even if it went into hiding immediately following sex. She knew this, was way ahead of me in that department, but I was just doing as I was taught regarding courtship. First you be who they want you to be: their father. Then you try to be who they will tolerate: their drunk father. If they are still around for stage three then you're in trouble. You swear, scratch you balls, pick your nose, leave dishes in the sink, never cook or make the bed, swear, ignore their monthly complaints, etc. But they hang around like the cat you tried to get to shut up with a bowl of milk. Next thing you know you have two cats. So you go back to who you have always been, who you masked at first, diluted second, but now you can't even recognize yourself. That's how the babes get you.
On our first meeting, Lacy had walked into Piper's room just as I was demonstrating the proper form for lighting a three foot long water bong. She watched patiently for about ten seconds, and after she had surveyed my Key West palm frond sombrero, my mended flip flops, by braided and beaded hair, she asked who I was.
“Piper's oldest friend in the world,” I coughed. “My name is Ogden. You may call me Oggy, as in 'Oggy, does this thong make me look sexy?'“
She didn't react, but merely asked, “Oggy?”
“Oh, yes...wait,” I addressed the kids in front of me on the rug, “Hold it down there so the smoke doesn't get out. There you go.” Then I gazed at the dark haired wonder and asked, “What's your name, my pretty?”
Normally, I would stare into the carpet and rub my hands together and act like a retard, but a few puffs of Colombia's finest had me thinking outside the box, so to speak. My identity, the old roles I normally played, seemed silly. Not to mention the months in Florida where I had enjoyed a vacation from Bonigan's reinforcement of said roles.
“Why don't you come over here, girlfriend. Keep Oggy company.”
“I'm fine here,” said the sleek brunette. “My name is Lacy Kirschinbaum, see? Not 'Pretty.' You may call me Lacy, as in 'Can I get you another pint of ice cream, Lacy?'“
Lacy's voice was the equivalent of hands on hips, but I felt sharp. Lacy looked like a ripe sexual grape. Her hair was a delicious dark chocolate, unlike the sun bleached butterscotch-rave-heads I'd met in Florida, or the platinum-haired, paisley-robbed starlets bopping around California. This chick had that extra 5%.
She asked, “Where does someone like you live?”
Someone like me? This sentence construction could be taken many ways. I chose to interpret it thusly: “Where does someone as good looking as you live?' My mother always said to look for the positive side in everything.
“Well Lacy, I live under bushes, in cars, in donut shops. You know I got mugged in Hartford? Ask Piper.”
“Right. How do you eat?”
“I steal food from the Taco bell dumpster, obviously. I'm a vegetarian so it takes some work.”
“Where do you get your protein? You're thin as a fak.”
This showed that she'd read up on the subject of vegetarianism, unlike my pre-war grandparents.
“Sometimes I cheat,” I said, “and eat chicken flavored Ramen noodles. Listen, Lace, by any chance do you have seven really short friends, names of Sleepy, Sneezy, Grumpy and so on?”
This was by far my smoothest line, with the punch-line 'Because you are the fairest one in the land,” but Lacy ignored the bait like a Rainbow Trout shuns an Electric Creeper lure.
“So,” she summed up, “you're a stinking hobo who drinks and smokes pot...like a loser?”
Not exactly a stunning vita, but in the ballpark.
“Yeah, I guess you've known me for fifteen seconds, so go ahead and piss in my face, Lacy. I'm a stinking hobo who drinks and smokes pot. Yes, that's it. I just crawled out from under Piper's futon mattress and started to drink and smoke pot. Right guys?”
The bright and eager minds with their lips wrapped around the business end of a Hookah pipe all nodded in response to a question they hadn't even heard.
“I do many things, Lace. I'm a joker; I'm a smoker; I'm a midnight toker. I do things that you could only dream of, sister. When you are curled up in your Smurf pajamas, and you have your stuffed animals around your head and your pictures of you ex-boyfriends on your desk and your journal filled with half-truths, my shinebox and I are on the streets where the monkeys run wild.”
Lacy crossed her arms and leaned against the doorframe as I tried to remember what her original question was.
“But I don't drink unless I want to punish myself.”
“Why?”
I thought the answer was obvious. Alcohol is poison. Why else would I drink poison?
“A poetic question, Lace. One I've asked myself on occasion. Why did Schiraldi throw an 0-2 pitch over the plate? Why did Stanley unleash a pitch that missed its target by two feet? Why did ABBA break up? The answer is ever elusive.”
“But why?”
Tenacious little minx, I thought.
“I don't want to. Why toy around with booze? Booze just messes with your pleasure centers. Numbs them. Peyote actually dissolves your identity. Do you want to dissolve your identity with me, Lace?”
“Where do you sleep at night?”
I'd been asked fewer questions during the Celebration Graduation investigation.
“Who cares? In the bushes where the cops can't see. Where else?”
“What does your mother think of this?”
A Psychology major. Nice. What should I say? My mother? Don't talk about her. Don't you mention my mother in this dirty place. She's better than you, she's better than all of you. Or Mommy? My momma? She loves Ogden. She loves her Oggy no matter what he does. He's a good boy. Yes. Ogden is a good boy, isn't he mum? Mummy? Don't hit me again. I'll wash the sheets. Yes.
“My mother thinks I am a genius. Don't you?”
“What does your father think of this?”
That one was easy.
“My father has unresolved issues from his childhood.”
“Don't you get lonely sometimes?”
Get lonely? Did the Buddha get lonely? Did Jack Kerouac get lonely? Did Daryl Hall get lonely without John Oates? Of course. More accurately, I sometimes got not lonely.
“I talk to John Galt, my imaginary friend. Would you like to meet him?”
Lacy shook her pretty hair.
“How do you get from place to place?”
“I hitchhike. I put my thumb out and people stop and I get in their car and they take me somewhere. Or else I get on a bus full of smelly strangers with birth defects and social problems. How about you? How do you get places?”
“I drive. Is that why you're limping and using that cane?”
To answer this question I had to rearrange myself on Piper's futon couch. The room was suddenly stuffy, so I told the children to take the bong to another room. After they shuffled out, I stood up with the help of my walking stick. The months in Florida had improved my condition, but not cured me completely of the 1986 scars. I was starting to believe I would limp for the rest of my life, or until I could solve the Game Six puzzle. I stood next to the window and gave Lacy a good window shop.
Lacy was near the open door, ready to bolt, leaning. She was wearing 1988 fashions, namely pinstripe jeans with a tapered leg, brown penny loafers, white blouse with an upturned collar, a pink polka dot bow on the right side of her head. She cut a stunning figure. I couldn't help notice that she was checking out my Hawaiian shorts, surfer shirt and cleverly mended flip flops. My palm frond hat was the creme broule of my outfit.
Back to her question: why was I using the cane. I wanted to explain myself clearly the first time since, in my experience, it was at this juncture that my relationships became strained. Sure, Lacy was as smoking as Samantha Fox, but I'd learned to have some respect for myself, or at least how to fake it. I couldn't just say what she wanted to hear, so I spoke very clearly, like a kitchen boss speaking to his soggy socked illegal dishwasher from El Salvador. My lips felt like inflated balloons. Had I been smoking cow dung?
“I limp, Lacy, because Calvin Schiraldi threw a pipe fastball to Ray Knight on an 0-2 pitch. That sissy bitch destroyed my life with the last pitch he threw as a real man. And my walking staff is Alaskan Willow. See? Diamond Willow. Very rare. And hitchhiking will save the world.”
Lacy squinted for signs that I was trying to put one over on her. The simple country folk are often struck by the seamless clarity of my three-part plan. Lacy was no different.
“Save the world? You think you're Flash Gordon?”
A sense of humor. Always nice to find.
“Yeah. Silly me. You know the Exxon Valdez accident?”
“In Alaska?”
“It was all my fault.”
“How did you cause the Exxon Valdez accident?”
I smacked my head. Once again, I'd lost another one. As many times as I did this, I couldn't seem to get someone on my side the first time through.
“Because I wasn't hitchhiking, of course. And I wasn't naked. How else? Are you not paying attention or did I leave something out?”
Just when most people turn tail and head for the hills, Lacy took a step into the room. I love the way some girls move, like a dance. Lacy was the queen of them all when it came to walking. Darcy now seemed like a clumping linebacker in comparison. Rose McCorley, whose approach made my eyes bulge, could have taken lessons from Lacy. When a pitcher gets into a groove, like when Clemens struck out 20 Mariners in 1986, his mechanics transcend baseball. Lacy looked like that.
Then, like a court appointed psychologist, Lacy proceeded to pick my worldview, made vulnerable by the closet grown pot I'd just smoked, apart. When the interview was over, I hardly knew anything about Lacy, but she knew practically everything about me. She knew I felt responsible for the breakup of Wham! She knew I'd come close but had not actually engaged in sex while at the beloved alma mater, and that I considered myself a partial failure because of this. She knew I dreamed of striking out Ray Knight with a curveball in the dirt. She also deduced that my political stance was mostly talk and when faced with a true crisis I would most likely run for the hills. She even sat patiently while I gave a detailed explanation of each face on the 1986 Red Sox team photo. By the end of our talk, I was smitten.
She smiled when she left and said, “You're an interesting person, Oggy. I don't know what to think of you now. At first I thought you were a creep. They said that Piper had adopted a homeless person. You look like one of the bums begging for spare change in the Hartford bus terminal, but you're here in my dorm and you can talk and you have parents and a history you can remember.”
Well, it was an improvement on 'A hobo who drinks and smokes pot...like a loser,' but I still didn't foresee a wedding announcement going out with the morning mail. The observations that I could “talk and had parents and a history I could remember” were hardly stunning character strengths that would have Lacy calling her parents and saying, “I think I met The One.” Still, I had to persevere. Say what you will about my patre, but he didn't raise a quitter.
“Funny you should mention bums. I was actually begging for spare change in the Hartford Bus Terminal just a few days ago. It was because I was robbed. I've hitchhiked a thousand rides with the usual Jesus freaks and fags, all the way from Alaska to California to Virginia, but I take the bus one time and I get robbed. What does that tell you?”
“That you have your own way of looking at the world. You are kind of a selfish asshole, but it is only because you're inexperienced with people.”
I felt my stock falling.
“You're just untamed,” Lacy continued emotionlessly. “You have no social skills, but you might be human underneath this homeless front.” She cast a gray eye on my flip flops. “You've got the normal issues with your parents, but you amplify them so you think they're special, like you invented them.”
Then it hit me: She understood. I hadn't alienated another one. Yes, I have my own way of looking at the world. I live in my body every day and there is no getting out of it. I wake up and I have to make it to the end of the day just like everyone else and nobody really cares if I get there. I'm unique but I'm not special. Despite all my ranting about Ray Knight, Lacy understood. After she left I wrote in my journal: “Met Lacy-psyche! The best legs and smart. Must be honest with her about Dewey and Fisk.”
Lacy returned hours later and allowed me to walk her to class. She walked and I floated. Thus, I became that guy I always wanted to be, walking the cute girl to class, a history of travel and adventure in my eyes, a unique way of living, a bewildering philosophy, a journal full of clever confessions and the observation that the world basically did not appreciate what I had to offer. But there's this one girl I just met...she understands about me...she knows Ray Knight...real hot...legs...eyes like Darcy...her name is...
Lacy. Who was I when I first met Lacy? As I sat next to her on the couch in her apartment, The Sound of Music unfolding on the television, I kept asking myself this question in an effort to recreate him, to reconstruct that winning personality. Where had the love gone? Had I been more funny or less self absorbed back in the springtime of our love? Did I ignore her more or flatter her with attention? Did I pay more attention to her friends? Did I pay more attention to Piper? Did I promise to introduce her to my sexy friends? I didn't know. Because “Courtship: Stage One” was false and hateful, I had no idea of how I had behaved. Now I was drying on the shore as the tide pulled back. As Kurt would say, I had screwed another pooch. Now the only thing I set ablaze when Lacy saw me was her sense of sarcasm. The chance for a hand job on her couch, some passionate petting in a hot tub, oral sex on Piper's dirty futon, tender intercourse in her candlelit bedroom, had passed. The bottle was empty. Game over. Fine. She was still coming to Mexico with me.
On the ride from New Hampshire I had decided that I would not go to Mexico alone. I was not going to cross the country again with a series of crazy road prophets as commentators. Lacy would come with me and there would be no argument. There would be no argument because I wasn't going to ask her. I was going to take her. Something precious had to be sacrificed for Schiraldi to get that 0-2 pitch past Knight. An adolescence of loyalty and grief had apparently not been enough to secure the Big Win. But there were other things, other people, who I could offer in tribute. I wasn't going to kidnap Lacy; I was going to liberate her. The only question was how to get her into the car.
“We have a good life,” I mused from the couch, “I like how we live. I like sitting with you, looking at you, listening to you breathe. We're healthy, you know. Comparatively speaking, we're doing pretty good. We could have a kid you and me. We could have ten kids. Rob banks. Make pottery. Go to Mexico.”
“How's Cans?”
Of course she'd ask about Piper. She'd only known him for two years and I'd known him for a hundred. Lacy could only dream of my history with Piper, the Smear the Queer challenges, the Kickball tournaments, the head-first slides, the Basketball games, the High School hallway jousts and jeers. I wasn't Piper's closest friend, or even his closest admirer, but I knew him.
After Schiraldi did what he shouldn't have done, Piper, that model Sophomore who turned in all his homework assignments and refused to participate in the pizza-hucking contest held every Thursday at lunch, found me at my secret hideout under the Football bleachers and said, “Tough break, Oggy. You win some and you lose some. Maybe next year,”
Tough break? I was suddenly crippled on my right side and he calls that a tough break? Dewey drove a knife into my heart and pounced on it with his steel cleats and Piper calls it a tough break? I lay in a brain dead trance for three days as Schiraldi drilled me in the nuts and he calls it a tough break? Really? As I watched him take the court for basketball, I thought, I'll show you a tough break. While Cristo was doing the wave in the half-filled bleachers, I was silently praying Piper would break his ankle or something equally devastating. Maybe he would lose control of the ball in the final seconds. That would be a tough break. Too bad. Rotten luck. Better luck next year, Mr. Tough Break.
“He's Piper,” I told Lacy. “His shit doesn't stink. He's always one step ahead of me. You know when the Sox lost he said 'Tough break.' That was it. He didn't care about me or my baby. He doesn't know Ray Knight. He lives in a clean little soap bubble. A perfect world. He'd throw a curveball in the dirt to Ray Knight. Of course. It's fun for him. He was good at everything. Do you know he ran track.”
I would stand behind trees in the forest near the BHHS athletic fields, with my shorts down, and watch Piper charge full speed around the track, a crimson blur. He was as unaware of my jealous eyes as he was of Darcy's sexy, stripper-like movements (The real reason I was there) as she stretched her powerful legs with Rose and the rest of the Girls Track team. While Piper rested with his hands on his knees after a triumphant 100-yard dash, and Darcy slowly bent over to touch her perfect toes, I humped a sugar pine. I groaned as my knees quivered, leaving me slumped and panting against the tree. My seed dripped sap-like down the rough gray bark as Darcy adjusted her blue spandex tights and I gasped as I saw her crotch press against the fabric. As the official results gave Piper first place I panted, “Do you love me, Darcy?” But the cheering crowd was too loud. Neither Piper nor Darcy could hear me. Darcy put her hands on her hips and I imagined they were my hands pulling her into my thrusts. I finally lost my grip on the tree, collapsing to the dirt moaning, “Darcy. I love you.” and massaging my inflamed prostate gland. Darcy was out of sight preparing for her race while Rose congratulated Piper with a tug on his ears. I tugged my fouled Bugle Boy cargo pants on and looked around to make sure I hadn't been observed. I was alone, as always. No forest nymph had appeared to pleasure me and give me bags of gold or a secret love potion I could slip in Darcy's boxed milk. I was alone and soon I would stumble back into the quiet forest where my secrets were safe, where I could curse humanity from the safety of my crooked plywood shack.
None of this was fit for Lacy's ears so I stuck to safe path.
“Piper is just perfect,” I grinned and then moved closer to Lacy. She eyed me sideways at first and then looked right at me, those black brown eyes, like a rabbit's, alert and shiny, staring at me.
“Why don't you like him.”
“Are you listening to me? I love him. Maybe too much. He doesn't do anything wrong. He's perfect. What? My first girlfriend used to look at me like that, like you're looking at me now.”
She was looking at me like I had eaten all the leftover Chinese food and then lied about it.
“When was that? In the jungle while you were smoking pot and getting high?”
No, it had been when I ate all the Chinese food and lied about it. But that was a defensive answer and if Lacy was going to respect me I needed to be aggressive.
“Do girls practice that look?”
“No, Oggy. It comes naturally when we get pissed off. It's genetic.”
“So you're mad? I come around here and I hit on you and you don't care. Then I make you mad. What am I doing? I should leave.”
“Maybe you should.”
She was supposed to say, “No, please don't go.”
“Why don't you go?”
“The same reasons I'm here. Love. Sadness. Sacrifice. A combination of all three. Who knows?”
“You don't know? You drive from New Hampshire to see me and you don't know if you're happy or sad or in love? How many more days of 8th grade can you miss and still pass?”
I groaned. Leave it to a girl to twist my words around.
“Lace, you look just like Donna Reed right after Jimmy Stewart gets mad and yells at the kids. Remember? He kicks the models of the bridge and the city and all the kids get scared and start to cry. Then he tries to apologize but only makes things worse. You look just like Mary. Beautiful and angry, but torn between two conflicting choices.”
“What are you talking about, Oggy?”
“Let's go up to Bedford Falls and walk barefoot across the meadow. We'll watch the sun come up and then we'll walk down and the whole town'll be talkin' about us. It'll be a scnadal.”
Lacy stared at me as though waiting for the punch line.
“It's a Wonderful Life. You're Mary and I'm George. See...”
“I know the movie, ya fak.”
Lacy pulled her legs under her, which is something I love to watch, something so sexy in a Boxing Helena sort of way. She clutched a couch pillow and said without turing, “Watch the movie Oggy.”
If you've been paying attention then you know the movie was The Sound of Music. If you haven't been paying attention then I guess you're just better than me. You think my tale of love and obsession is beneath you. Maybe you would prefer I just tell you the end right now and save us both some time? Well, tough luck. You bought the ticket and you'll have to stay on until the ride stops. Put the water bong down and concentrate. I'm working my ass off here.
As I was saying before I had to throttle some of my duller audience members out of their drug induced daze, The Sound of Music was jogging along in full techno-colorific beauty. I felt the warmth of a Swiss summer pour into me and ease the cold from my fingers.
“Did you put this on for me?” I asked hoping she would say, “Yes, Oggy. Your happiness is my first priority.”
“No, ya fak. I happen to like it. I like things too.”
“You are very pretty, Lace,” I served up in the hopes I could steer the conversation onto the topic: sex, sub topic: Lacy and Oggy. “Very singular,” I added.
“Thank you, Oggy.”
“You are prettier than Julie Andrews. Even prettier than she was fifty years ago or whenever this was filmed.”
“But she can dance and sing.”
“You can sing and dance as good as she can.”
“No.”
I listened to Julie sing “Doe a deer, a female deer”. The lyrics were so spirited and the singing was so energetic and the dancing was so joyful and the acting was so convincing that I said, “This is the greatest movie I have ever seen.”
“Haven't you seen this before?”
“I don't think so. I would have remembered this part. This is great! Brilliant! It's almost as good as It's a Wonderful Life.”
“Settle down, ya fak. It is just getting started.”
And she was right. The movie is a flawless combination of lovable characters, compelling drama, dynamic musical performances and a fast plot set in the beautiful Alps. Dynamite. It wasn't pornographic and I still loved it. Like a Hoover does to dirt, it sucked me in.
“Lace, I want to go Switzerland with you. Forget Mexico.”
“Ok.”
I told her that I was serious, opposed to my normally lighthearted and frivolous frame of mind.
“Let's go.”
“Alright. See, all we needed was a little bonding over The Sound of Music and we understand each other. We're going to the Alps!”
I yodeled.
“I think we've always understood each other,” said Lacy with a Kathleen Turner throaty-ness in her voice. She added “Ya fak,” as an afterthought.
“Really? Always? Then who's Ray Knight?”
“The monster under your bed.”
I was astonished. Normally someone said Ray Knight was the Mets shortstop, or a member of Nixon's cabinet, or some other admission of ignorance.
“Yes! You are the first person to get that right. You and Toddy Bonigan understand. Ray Knight is the monster under my bed. But I know how to get rid of him. I know things too.”
I was quiet until Julie Andrews started singing a familiar song, like a memory of a cloud. I knotted my brow.
“I've heard this one before. I recognize this.”
“Then you must have seen the movie. It's my favorite,” said Lacy.
“No, I've heard this one years ago. A lifetime ago. Where was it?”
“Brown paper packages tied up with string. These are a few of my favorite things.” Lacy's voice brought it all back to me.
“Holy Von Trapp Family Singers! For the last sixteen years I thought my mother wrote this song. She used to sing it when we lived in Maine. I must have been three or four years old. This is one of the first songs I remember hearing. I probably heard this in the crib. Shit. It's just been downhill ever since. Having my mother sing this song to me in the crib when I was one year old...that was the high point of my whole life.”
Lacy opted not to analyze this revealing comment and instead sang the rest of the song in an effortless soprano voice as sweet as the Vermont maple syrup from my mother's birthplace. I wished I was four years old again and living in rural Maine with my parents, eating skillet fried flapjacks with butter and real syrup, falling into piles of leaves, climbing trees, scraping my knee, learning to read. Every October my mother, brother and I would carve intricate shapes in pumpkins and pick apples and make pies while my father raked all the leaves in the yard into a big pile we could jump into. In the Winter we would build snowmen and slide down the hill made by the plow as my mother baked muffins and steamed milk for cocoa in the fire warmed house. In the Spring the lilac bushes would bloom deep purple and I would practice hitting a big white ball off a plastic tee. In the Summer we would watch fireflies in the absence of city lights and look for shooting stars through the dense forest canopy. There is no time like Childhood...even Childhood.
“Lace? What are your favorite things?”
I silently prayed she would say, “Sex with Oggy,” but was dashed again.
“Hellos,” she said without pause. “New people who like to share their thoughts. Wood fires. My dogs. Silk. Dancing. The moon. Music. Did I say my dogs? I love my dogs. You should meet them. My Mom. My Dad. My sister. Good mini blinds. Perfume. Sight. Flannel sheets. I love apple cider in October. I love sexy men who smell good and can dance and have nice thick lips like yours when you shave.”
She paused to catch her breath. I had never seen her so eager to talk.
“I think Rodgers and Hammerstein would have had trouble rhyming 'Mini blinds' and 'flannel sheets.”
She smiled without showing her teeth and looked like Donna Reed on the Bailey's honeymoon, when she stood before the fireplace in 320 Sycamore, with the posters of exotic places, aglow in womanly magic and love. Glowing.
“I like cream colored ponies and crisp apple strudel too.”
“Lace, I love to hear you sing. My mother used to sing this song to me. She knew all the words and I thought she made it up because they were all her favorite things too. Maybe she did make Schnitzel but I thought it was spaghetti. You know what I think of when the Dogs bite and the bees sting?”
“The Red Sox?”
“Close. My playroom in Maine. My mother painted the ocean on the walls and I had all my stuffed animals. I mean, I had them and could keep them all together. And we had sock puppets with the little google eyes sewn on and felt tongues and I had control of it all. I could put the stuffed animals in a row and they wouldn't go anywhere and the ocean never moved. Everything was right.”
I hadn't thought about my playroom in Maine in ten years and was lost for a moment in the fragments of what I wanted to remember.
“If you could have anything, what would it be, Lace? You want me to shave? I'll do it. Anything.”
“I want my dad to stay home more.”
“Alright, anything but that. Name something else. Anything. I promise.”
“I want my mom to be happy.”
Strike two.
“Anything but those two things. Come on. Give me a chance.”
“I don't want anything else.”
Lacy sadly blinked her Joan Collins lashes and raised a plucked eyebrow at me. We studied each other for a moment. Did she think I looked like George Bailey when he gazed at Mary across the dance floor at the high school? Once could hope. She turned back toward the TV.
“If you come to Switzerland with me, I will carve out a good life for us. I promise.”
“Make it here.”
“What? Make what here? Brownies?”
“Carve your good life here at UCONN. I want you to stay. Don't leave.”
It was the first time anyone had said those two simple words. Don't leave. Cristo had just told me I was stupid and that I couldn't miss watching Roger Clemens open up the 1992 season, or I'd miss the start of the BHHS baseball season. He never said that he wanted me to stay. Even my father had just tried to dissuade me by predicting disasters like my being briefly happy. I had assumed my role in all this boy/girl/Timewraith drama was as the traveler, the vagabond, the clown, the one who sacrificed his stability to explore. How else would my three-part plan ever get from one place to another? I figured that as long as I viewed myself as a character in a pulp fiction novel, I was fine.
The Timewraiths had trained me well, but Lacy was suggesting I trade my walking staff for something as risky as a possible relationship. Such a line buggled everything up, but it also made me believe she wouldn't struggle to much when I took her to Mexico. Was it really that much different than college? Wasn't a roof still a roof, a car still a car, a gang of street children still a field trip? Seriously.
“Stay here, Oggy. Enroll at UCONN. Take classes. Paint. You don't have to go to Switzerland or Mexico.”
“But you could come. Just look at it like an arranged marriage, like in Fiddler on The Roof. You're Jewish. You could say we were arranged by Dwight Evans. Together we could beat the Mets.”
Lacy looked at the ceiling and sighed, “Do you even care how crazy you sound?”
Back in T.S.O.M., Mother Superior was telling the flibbertygibbet to climb ev'ry mountain after she tried to be a nun again. Alas, some people were meant for the cloister and some were meant to marry their employer and smuggle his nine dysfunctional kids into Austria. How come some weren't meant to join their strange bearded friend for a trip to Mexico?
“No, Oggy, the movie has nothing to do with your decision. You are free to stay or leave. It is up to you.”
Free? Something about that term made me wonder why I was going to Mexico in the first place. If I was free then why did I have to force Lacy to come with me? Why not just stay in Connecticut, fail some more classes, give Lacy hickies, play intramural soccer, get stoned between classes. The rest of the civilized world was doing it. Why not me? Then I groaned as I pictured Rene crying in my hallway.
“Actually...”
Somehow, the females of our fine species were given a sixth sense that helps them identify malingerers like myself. If my beard, Red Sox hat, and graffiti covered car weren't enough, I also apparently emanated an aura of disrepute that had just hit Lacy like the S. hits the F.
“What, Oggy. What did you do? You did something bad. I can tell.”
“I can't say. Piper told me not to confess.”
“Cans? Was he in on it? He'll tell me.”
She reached for the phone. I tried to pull her back, but she swatted my hand and nearly broke it. I realized suddenly that she could kick my ass if she wanted to. In order to smuggle her 3000 miles into Mexico, I'd need a crash course in cleverness.
“No. Cans wasn't in on it. It was all me. You don't have to know. It isn't your business.”
These words fell on Lace like drawing a line in the dirt and telling Atilla the Hun, “That side is yours. This side is mine.”
“Then I'll call your dad. He'll tell me.”
She held up the phone as a threat, like George Bailey holding Mary's Hatch’s bathrobe hostage while she hid in the hydrangeas.
“Come on, Oggy. You tell me or I wake Dante Bleacher up and ask him. What did you do?”
Once again, I found myself spiraling into the thick stuff. I swear, if there's a hole out there I'll be the first to fall in it. Go ahead, dig a hole in your backyard and see if you don't wake up tomorrow morning with me in there. If not, just wait. I'll show up eventually.
“It's horrible, babe. I made such a mistake.”
“Don't “babe” me, Oggy. You aren't going to “babe” your way out of this. All the “babes” in the world won't make you less of a fahk.”
Less of a fahk? How much more ignominious could I get?
“But I've been sick lately. I've been out of my head. Ray Knight, he's the monster under my bed, you said it yourself. Why did Mac have to leave Schiraldi in? He already pitched two innings. Why? Look, this is Dave Henderson. He hit a home run in the tenth. And this is Bill Buckner...”
“Put your centerfold away. What was it, Oggy. Why aren't you free? Come on. What's the big mystery.”
posted by Oggy Bleacher | 8:19 PM
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