Nobody Bats a Thousand Read online

  NOBODY BATS A THOUSAND

  a book of stories

  by

  STEVE SCHMALE

  Copyright 2012 by Steve Schmale. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without permission from the author

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This book is dedicated to my sister and mother with great thanks for their love and support,

  with special thanks to Bosko, Mary Toll, Rex, and yes, Timbro

  “We cannot trust people who are nonconformists. We will make conformists out of them in a hurry…The organization cannot trust the individual; the individual must trust the organization…”

  Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald’s

  A BAR STORY

  I truly believe everyone has a cross to bear, and we are all in this together. At least that’s what I tell myself whenever I get so sick of dealing with drunks and regulars and drunk regulars that I feel like taking out an Uzi to clear the room faster than one of Orson Welles’s beer farts. But actually, as far as bar jobs go, this gig isn’t so bad. Big Al, the owner of the place, knows what it’s all about. He did his time working on this side of the bar. He appreciates that I’ve been around a bit, that I know what I’m doing and am reasonably honest, so he pays me better than any other joint in town would, and here the tips, though not great, are consistent, so things could be worse. Things could always be worse. That’s the other great rationalization I use whenever I need a bit of magic to get me through a shift.

  My shift starts at four in the afternoon, coinciding with the start of Happy Hour and lasts until about midnight when I close down the lounge a couple of hours after the restaurant has closed.

  When I came into work on this particular afternoon it looked like any other Friday, a bar lined with familiar faces, and people sitting at the six small tables and two large booths in the lounge, being served by Delores a food waitress helping out in the bar until the restaurant got busy.

  Eddie, the day guy, for some reason was never anxious to leave. So I piddled around, making sure everything was stocked and ready for the night, letting Eddie milk his exit for the requisite good-byes and tips, when Big Al’s twenty-four year old, big mouthed, Donald Trump/ Sylvester Stallone-wannabe son, Little Al, came up to me.

  “Tonight’s the night,” he said, happy and excited. “I got Lee coming in at seven as a second bartender, and a bouncer who’ll be checking IDs and stamping hands to save you the trouble,” he said. “I’m gonna go home and change, but I’ll be back before the band shows up.” Getting no response he mumbled, “Tonight’s the night,” again, then turned and walked away.

  Just then Fatboy, who was playing dice for drinks with five or six other guys, showed he was ready for another beer in his patented fashion by precariously balancing his empty longneck Budweiser bottle upside down on the bar.

  “I got two in the well, Fatboy,” he said, and I could trust he did. I didn’t know him well enough to judge his honesty on other things, but when it came to drinks he owed or was owed, he was as unimpeachable as the last good Pope. Fatboy always wore a straw cowboy hat, winter or summer, and was about as skinny as the starving Africans you see on the news, but he was called Fatboy because he called everybody else fatboy, something he had probably done for a good portion of his seventy or so years.

  “So what was Al’s kid talking about?” he asked as I delivered his beer.

  “The banquet room is always slow in January, so Big Al is letting Junior use it to put on a concert. I’m surprised you haven’t heard about it, Fatboy. I figured you’d probably be at all the rock shows.”

  “The only shows I go to have naked women in ‘em,” Fatboy said as he took the dice cup, flopped out a hand, and slid the cup back to Randy next to him who took his time rolling the dice around inside the cup in sort of a bouncy, swirling technique that helped him feel some sort of control over the random hand he was about to produce by smashing the cup down hard enough to rattle glasses up and down the bar. From Randy’s expression you could never tell if he just rolled five sixes or a stiff since most of the time he had a menacing, narrow, deep-lined, dark-eyed look which seemed full of pain or the need to inflict it. If he smiled the expression still seemed full of misanthropic glee, but I knew him well enough to know he was more than just a big, mean, overbearing redneck. Actually, he was intelligent, had a good sense of humor, and was a good family man with three different families from three different marriages to prove it. Next to him, flanking a mystery patron, were Manson and Mason; partners, as their fathers were before them, in the biggest insurance agency in town though they didn’t seem to spend a lot of time there. Next to them was Bobby Hill who drove a pristine thirty-year-old, red Cadillac Coup Deville big enough to house two large families of Asian immigrants. I suspected Bobby hadn’t changed much since the seventies; his hair was thinning on top but he still had it styled in sort of a hard-dude version of a shag haircut. He always smoked his Marlboro cigarettes squeezed between his thumb and middle finger, always wore a diamond pinkie ring, a gold neck chain made obvious by unused shirt buttons, and he only smiled when he was a little buzzed and had the opportunity to sweet talk some chick as he relived his days of past glories employing a variety of unoriginal techniques in his pursuit of meaningless recreational sex.

  On both sides of this group were two other groups, actually three and four man gangs of Friday afternoon regulars wearing good suits and cheap ties. All of them had well-paying jobs I suspected, even though they were, to a man, at least to me, as cheap as watches bought from a Tijuana street vendor. All were doing their thing of vying for the attention of one of our resident middle-aged, high-tone barflies who, despite time, booze, and road miles, still looked pretty damn good. Mary Ann was six-feet tall and voluptuous. She drove a Mercedes, the only thing she salvaged from her last marriage, and she always treated me like a servant even though we both knew she didn’t have two dimes to rub together. This kept her worried whenever her glass was near empty, fearing the slim possibility an admirer somewhere in the bar wouldn’t offer to buy her a drink, and she would end up looking foolish fondling an empty glass, a fear she rarely if ever had to actually confront.

  Mary Ann looked good but had a rough time stacking up against her colleague Jane, surrounded by a group of guys at the other end of the bar. Jane was a sexy freak of nature, invitingly exotic, and somehow still gorgeous and thin despite her years of barroom allegiance. She had beautiful lightly-freckled skin, black eyes, long black hair, and was still built as firm and full as a twenty-one year old doing a spread for Playboy, which she was rumored once to have done. But beyond just her looks she was a real piece of work, an extreme larger-than-life personality, a local legend, a walking dichotomy capable of out swearing and out drinking a clubhouse full of Hell’s Angels, or able to become so soft-spoken, articulate, and sophisticated she could make the Queen of England seem as loud and obnoxious as Howard Stern with a head full of speed locked in a room full of midgets and strippers.

  At one time or another, Jane had been thrown out of nearly every bar in town, but with me she always played by the rules. If she started to stretch them more than the situation allowed I’d just remind her she was a lady; she’d always cool it and that was that.

  I saw these two women almost every day. They always seemed to be working somebody for something, but by observation, speculation, and intuition, I figured Jane or Mary Ann nev
er went home and screwed any of the poor schmucks who doted over them. In fact, looking at these cats with their saggy bodies, and thinning hair or bad toupees, the fantasy was about all they could handle anyway. So they were happy just trying to keep the ladies happy, and the ladies were happy being in the spotlight, fielding their admirers’ regard. Come to think of it, that night just about everybody on both sides of the bar seemed contented. The guys rolling dice were damn near gleeful, probably because the mystery roller in the middle seemed to be losing every round, and I was happy, as far as that goes, being I was working and all, because everything was simple and smooth. I knew what everyone in the entire room was drinking and was in tune enough to anticipate when they needed another. I could go about my business nearly anonymously without much extra thought or bother working as a team with Delores, who was great to work with, a one-in-a-thousand type, who was always so friendly and happy that no one around her was allowed to slip into a bad mood.

  Being more than caught up on everything, and having a little free time to reflect, I looked around the room and started to think how much this scene, the people and the atmosphere, reminded me of my first bar gig back in the seventies. I’ve worked a lot of places since then; rock’n’roll, disco, and C&W clubs, dinner houses, and for a short time a high-class hotel. But that first job is special, like a first love, and though it was over twenty-five years ago, when I was in my early twenties, some memories are as clear to me as if they had happened the night before.

  It’s funny, but whenever you think about an old job, all you seem to remember are the good things; the fun, the highlights, the surprises, the oddities, and the lessons learned. You seem to overlook the down sides; the boredom, the drudgery of serving and being polite to people you despised, and the agony of doubling back to do the morning shift after closing the bar down just hours before. Not to mention the torture of having to work with hangovers so bad they turned eight-hour shifts into nightmares that seemed to last for years. So I have fond memories of that first gig. Even though I was a quiet, naïve kid, and all the old-time regulars, which were nearly everyone who walked through the door, gave me hell, and tested me every chance they could.

  Bobo’s Keyboard Lounge was the name of the place, and sure it was basically the same basic job back then as now, legally dispensing a drug to people who would probably be better off without it, but the more I pondered the more I realized how things have changed. Change stretched over so many years it had crept up on me almost unnoticed. Back then when the Pill was first in vogue, and before sex could kill you, recreation sex with near strangers was rampant. Oftentimes women, if they liked your looks, would give it up, probably quicker than they should with little or no questions asked, giving every Joe Schmo who didn’t look completely demented or deformed the chance to feel a little like Elvis. Also back then, low-grade cocaine was expensive, respected, and exotic, and people drank. Drinks were a buck, and people really drank. I saw the most respected businessmen in town drink quarts of booze every night, just being sociable, then they’d go home, get up early, go to work, and take care of business without missing a beat. In retrospect, I realize how strong those guys were and how differently things were viewed. Back then if some guy got busted for his second or third drunk driving he was just given a good slap on the wrist, and it was just another thing to joke and laugh about. Just as was the nightly, late-night brawl between the same loving married couple who suddenly turned psycho and hateful after a few too many drinks, or some poor, out-of-control, drunken soul punching out his best friend over an argument about fishing poles or the best color to paint a car  everything was forgotten the next day, and life went on.

  Now, though all the alcoholic rounders in front of me at Al’s were probably the best the respected drinking community currently had to offer, they were milquetoast compared to their barroom ancestors I’d dealt with years before. The lineage of those erstwhile regulars, that hardcore, resilient, socially successful, functional-alcoholic breed was watered down and dying, a shattered piece of history, and for some perverse reason I felt more than irresistibly nostalgic. I felt saddened and somewhat empty.

  Just then, as these maudlin sentimental thoughts were rummaging around my brain, in walked this skinny cat about six-foot-five and a hundred and ten pounds with dark eyebrows, short bleached hair, and a big hoop earring in his left ear. He was probably ten or fifteen years younger than the next youngest in the crowd which silently stopped and turned in unison to stare at the newcomer, much like the restaurant scene in Easy Rider.

  The kid walked up to me without looking around. “I’m doing sound tonight. Where do I set up?”

  “What you got?” I asked.

  “Not much, I was told the room was small. Two small stacks, two amps, two preamps, an equalizer, and my main board.”

  I nodded like I actually knew what he was talking about and pointed across the lounge to the door of the banquet room.

  “There’s a small stage in there. Do what you got to do. This isn’t going to be real loud is it?”

  “Not bad,” he said before he turned, went back outside, and returned making the first of several trips using a handcart to haul in these speakers and amplifiers that looked like they had a thyroid condition.

  Delores was at the waitress station patiently waiting for my attention.

  “Mrs. Milton says this doesn’t taste right,” she said with a tenuous look balanced between disgust and despair.

  “So, what else is new?” I said, referring to Mrs. Milton, who invariability sent back as tainted the first of the two Manhattans she consumed every early evening in direct, disciplined agreement to the three tall Beam and waters Mr. Milton allowed himself before the old couple shuffled off.

  Most of the time these two sharing a table didn’t appear to even know each other let alone like each other, but they’d been together long enough to experience it all as a team: the last part of the Great Depression; the full span of the Great War (neither of which seemed too great from my perspective); their kids, suckled, raised and released; and a house fully paid for on the road to retirement. They’d done all you can do to live the American Dream and now had nothing left to do but hang around out of curiosity to see which one would drop dead first, but in the interim Mrs. Milton got her jollies by always complaining about her first drink no matter how I prepared it. This used to bother me until one time, out of frustration, I dug into my bag of tricks to pull out something I still use to appease the old bag. “No problem,” I told Delores as I took a fresh rocks glass, dumped in the old drink and added a few ice cubes. Delores smiled, added a fresh cherry and a new red stir straw, made the delivery to a smiling Mrs. Milton then got the hell away before the old chronic whiner could come up with another complaint.

  “Damn! I just don’t believe it, how could I lose every single roll?” bemoaned the mystery roller between Manson and Mason to the amusement of the five other players he’d just again won the honor to sponsor. After I delivered the drinks the mystery man slid what remained of his money towards me. “I can’t believe this shit,” he said. “I’m on my way to the store to pick up some cat food and some sausage when I run into and get kidnapped by these two jerks,” he indicated Manson and Mason, who were both grinning and giggling like jerks. “One minute I was being cool, behaving myself, and enjoying my day off, and now, a few hours later I’m sitting here drunk in a strange bar with phone change left from a hundred dollar bill.”

  “Well, I didn’t charge you for that one.” I pointed to his drink (and I hadn’t because he was short and I didn’t have the heart to ask him for another three-fifty). “It’s like, buy forty, get one free,” I said, and I’m sure he was amused; he just didn’t show it. Instead he asked me if he could use the phone.

  I handed him the portable. He dialed, waited, and then smiled as he started to speak, “Hey baby, what if I bring home some Chinese?” His head bolted as he pulled the receiver from his ear. He sat stunned, pausing before he set down the phone
. “She called me a fucking son-of-a-bitch and hung up.” Another pause. “You think she’s mad?”

  “Just means it’s time to roll for another.” Fatboy slid him the dice cup. “Loser starts it up.”

  “No way, these two jerks are taking me home or somewhere. Maybe the EZ motel is a better stop for me tonight. Come on,” the mystery roller commanded as he pushed his drink away and stood. He nodded to Fatboy, Randy, and Bobby Hill. “It’s been a business doing pleasure with you,” he said as he turned and headed for the door. Manson and Mason both snickered and, unwilling to sacrifice their winnings, gulped down their full glasses of vodka and grapefruit juice.

  “You did it again, you dumb old shit,” Randy said to Fatboy. “You chased off the golden goose.”

  “Did not.”

  “Did to.”

  “Did not.”

  “Did to.”

  “What a sparkling debate,” I interrupted. “You two ought to turn pro, maybe get your own talk show.”

  “Not with this old coot. You put him on TV, the first thing he’d talk about is the joys of sex with seventy-year-old women or something…”

  “Would not.”