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September 2020

Turkey

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By:

Turkey 

by Alex Taylor

I get drunk and buy a bowling ball. The first game I bowl a 122. I’m the only one here besides the manager and a girl running the snack-shack. I’d say the silence of the place is because of COVID-19 but it’s a Monday afternoon in a Gillette bowling alley.

“How’s the ball feel?” asks the manager, who sold it to me.
“Alright,” I say.
“Try another game, you get three for free with the ball.”

I order another pitcher of Bud Light from the snack-shack and she brings two glasses along with it. I fill both. It’s my first day living in Wyoming and, between the beer, the ball and shoes, I’m already $175 invested into a new hobby.

I think of the first night you and I went bowling together back in Michigan. Neither of us were any good. We drank beer and ate bowling alley nachos. You complained they didn’t give you enough sour cream. I placed eight two-ounce cups of sour cream on the table while you were in the bathroom.

I start another game and bowl a 116. The snack-shack employee goes to smoke a cigarette in the parking lot. I finish both beers and pour two more.

“Any better?” the manager asks.
“Worse.”
“You just have to get angry at the pins,” he says. “That’s what I do.”

I think of the engagement ring collecting dust in your closet. I start another game and bowl a 154.

“Drinkin’ for two?” the snack lady says.
“Habit.”

She brings me another pitcher, $8 more to the tab. Monday is the alley’s pitcher special, like a minor league baseball team having $1 hotdog nights without any fans.

Maybe it’s the shoes, I think, so I buy a pair of bowling shoes. My tab grows to a considerable percentage of the building’s rental payment. I pour two more beers and slip into the footwear that makes me feel like I’m wearing clogs.

I think of all the unanswered messages and the missed graduation, of the happy birthday that never came and the new guy you’re probably using to erase the memory of me. I bowl a 171.

“That’s better,” the manager says, with nothing else to do but critique my game and pretend to wash bowling balls. “Did the advice work?”

I think of shame. I think of the time spent feeling bad for myself. I think of the year I’ve spent away from you and the year you’ve spent away from me. I bowl a 182.

Another $8 to the snack lady nets me a fresh pitcher as I fight the craving to smoke.

“You gonna be here all day?” she asks.
“Lookin’ that way.”

She takes the empty pitcher and goes back to her bar stool across the alley. The dog at home needs to be let out. One more game of therapy.

I think about the day you promised we’d never break up. I think about all the days I believed you. I think about the letters you wrote for all our anniversaries. I think about you and aim straight at the two-pin. I think about you and bowl two turkeys. I think about you and bowl a 211.

“Whatever you were thinking about was working,” the manager says.

I pack the bowling ball and the bowling shoes in my trunk. I drive away from the bowling alley not feeling much like a winner. I haven’t been bowling since.

 

Alex Taylor is a sports reporter for the Gillette News Record in Gillette, Wyoming. He graduated from Western Michigan University with a creative writing degree and regretted it so much he went and got an MFA in creative writing at the University of Tampa. His work has been published in the Tampa Bay Times, Fleas on the Dog, and The Daily Drunk.

Falmouth

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By:

Falmouth

by Dave Fromm

One time my uncle invited me and my cousin Mark to come down to Cape Cod and run in the Falmouth Road Race, a 7-mile “fun run” held every August. My uncle had been running it for years and Mark was a really serious runner. I was not a runner so I said thanks but no thanks and they went ahead with their plans. Then at the last minute Mark had to bail out and my uncle was going to have to run by himself so I said sure I’ll take Mark’s spot even though, being from western Massachusetts, I’m opposed to Cape Cod on principle.  Also I hadn’t trained at all, but this was several years ago, right around the end of the part of my life when I thought I could still do things like that.

I made my wife and kids come and we stayed with my aunt and uncle the night before the race. They made a big pasta dinner and we drank lots of Gatorade and beer to hydrate. Very early the next morning my uncle and I got up, drank some coffee and went down to meet a bunch of runners on buses that took us to the start. The buses smelled like Vaseline. I pinned Mark’s registration bib to the front of my t-shirt and ate a granola bar. Then we got into the corrals for the race.

The run began with a long gradual hill which transitioned into a series of rolling woodland hills and then into a very short, steep hill right at the end where terrible people lined the course and yelled at you if you started walking. In between the hills was a long stretch of beachfront where the sun and the salt air combined to suck all the moisture out of your body. The race had something like 14,000 runners and they ran the gamut from Kenyans to people in lobster costumes. I was passed by several people in lobster costumes. Spectators would yell “Come on, Mark! That guy’s wearing a costume!” and I felt bad for this Mark sucker until I remembered that I was wearing a bib with my cousin’s name on it. It was a really long, hot, depressing, and exhausting run. My uncle finished several minutes ahead of me.

At the finish, there was a big expo with food and vendors and music and we got water and more Gatorade and a free hot dog and parts of oranges and bagels. We reconvened with our families in the middle of the field, nursed our strained muscles and congratulated ourselves on surviving. Then we headed towards the cars to drive back to my uncle’s place.

Almost as soon as we left the post-race grounds, I started feeling nauseous, as if my whole body was unraveling from an hour-long clench. The race was so crowded that my wife had had to park almost a half-mile away in a residential neighborhood where every spot of median had a car on it. As I limped behind her, my stomach began to churn. I was glad we were heading back. The immediate future felt ominous and nobody wants to face something ominous in a porta-john at a 14,000-person expo.

“We need to get to my uncle’s,” I said.
“That’s what we’re trying to do,” said my wife.

By the time we reached the car I was cramping up. My wife got behind the wheel and the kids buckled themselves into their car seats. I slid into the passenger side.
“Drive as quick as you can,” I said.

The problem was there was nowhere to go. The neighborhood was a cul-de-sac and cars were bumper-to-bumper all the way around. It took us 20 minutes just to back out of the spot we were in.

I’d stopped sweating around mile 5 but sitting there started to sweat again. The waves of distress were building upon each other. I looked around the neighborhood but it was all residential — no convenience stores, no public libraries, not even a construction site. At that point I would have leapt at the porta-johns at the expo, but they were a half mile away and I no longer had that kind of range.

My wife started to laugh in the desperate way one might if suddenly forced to consider something previously unthinkable happening. The traffic wasn’t moving. We would creep forward, then stop. Creep, then stop. Some stops were short, some stretched into minutes. There was no way to measure progress.

Finally, with the main road still nowhere in sight, everything inside me went silent. But it wasn’t a peaceful quiet. It felt ominous, the quiet of a horror movie right before the jump scare. Except this jump scare would be intestinal. Metaphorically at least, the s- was about to hit the fan. Possibly the radiator.

On our right was a big family picnicking in the front yard of one of those classic clapboard Cape houses.
“I’ve got to ask them,” I said to my wife.
She didn’t say anything. She just stared straight ahead.

I got out of the car and walked quickly up to the family.
They looked at me.
“Hi,” I said, sort of wildly. “Sorry to bother you. It’s just, a long line of cars, you know?”
They didn’t respond, so I cut to the chase.
“And I was wondering if I could, uh, borrow your bathroom real quick?”

Borrow was a funny word to use about a bathroom, partly because it implied that I’d be returning it in the same condition, which wasn’t the case. Perhaps intuiting this, the grandfather in the lawn chair grimaced. It must have been his house. For a second, I thought maybe he was going to say no but he seemed like the kind of person who could recognize an emergency when he saw one. Maybe he was a veteran.
“Lot of Gatorade,” I said, hoping to create a sort of illusion.

The grandfather tilted his head toward the door and one of the younger women said, “I’ll show you where it is.”
She led me inside and pointed up a flight of stairs to an open door.
“Right there,” she said.

I thanked her and got up the stairs as fast as my condition allowed. Their upstairs bathroom was small and nondescript, and I have never felt more grateful to be in a stranger’s home. I locked the door and opened the back window. The episode was dreadful, but as these things go, over in seconds. When I looked for a way to cover my tracks, all I could find was a Cosmopolitan magazine atop the toilet tank.  I used it as a fan. It didn’t help.

I washed up, closed the door and raced back down the stairs and across the yard.
“Thank you so much,” I shouted, waving to the family on their picnic blankets. They waved back.

“That was quick,” said my wife.
I wiped the sweat off of my brow.
“Get us out of here,” I said.
She nodded.  But there was still nowhere to go.

We sat in the car, right in front of the house, for another 20 minutes, as members of the family went inside and came back out looking aghast. The grandfather’s grimace deepened, and he stared at me like I’d betrayed the platoon. I slunk low in my seat and looked straight ahead until he finally drifted out of sight.

Sometimes I think about that man and his house and his kind family. I wonder whether they gather every year for the Falmouth Road Race and, if they do, whether they tell the story of year a guy jumped out of a car after the race and bombed their lovely upstairs bathroom. I hope they can look back on that event and laugh about it. What a crazy thing! When I look back on it, it’s utterly mortifying, and the only silver lining I can see is that at least they still think that that guy’s name was Mark.

Dave Fromm is the author of a sports memoir entitled Expatriate Games, which chronicles his season playing semi-pro basketball in the Czech Republic in the mid-1990s, and a novel entitled The Duration.  He lives in Western Massachusetts with his wife and kids.

To Sport Right Now

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By:

To Sport Right Now

by Dale Rigby

I sympathize with what baseball is trying to do,
but it is almost like they are swatting at locusts.

                                           –Bob Costas on CNN, July 28, 2020

Swish. It’s sixth grade Field Day, and I’ve already won the chess tournament, the South America trivia contest, and finally nipped Cindy Barr, my secret sharer, in the 50-yard dash.   And now she’s peeking a smile from over by the hopscotch chalk when I bend my knees and swish my first free throw.  “Attaboy” shouts Mr. Snell.

 Is to watch Justin ginger locks Turner hit a walk-off intra-squad home run and feel deep despair, a premodern eclipse, as a visible caravan of cars queue in the panoramic Dodger Stadium parking lot cum makeshift testing site.

 Swish. Have some faith, Montaigne! This be no pimply-male-captain-of-the-playground narrative. Count on sum comeuppance. Even now I’m not sure why I tainted that triumphal stage. But boy did the boy. This gafted child broadcast to a playground of peers a curious propensity he’d hidden like Portnoy his wanking from all but his pinkie-sworn parents.

Is to remember that the 1918 Red Sox World Series victory over the Cubs ended on September 11, in a season shortened by the national draft board’s “work or fight” order that deemed sport unnecessary labor.

 Swish. At the age of my kindergarten naps with Dick and Jane you, the Doogie Howser of the early Renaissance, were already un-schooling in your father’s famous petri dish, gamboling from peasant nursery to Latin mastery, groomed a free and feral spirit from the larval stage.

Is to wonder whether to call this week’s waltz from West Side Story between the Dodgers and the sign-stealing Astros a melee or a brouhaha or a bench-clearing-brawl or a fracas or a donnybrook when it brings to mind jittery juveniles social distancing at a Sadie Hawkins dance.   

 Swish. And then, alas, at age six, he banished listless you to the College de Guyenne and the fourth grade. That sucked, eh? When even steely Headmasters fear to accost a superior tongue, the fellows don’t exactly welcome one of the fellers. Take me out to the bully-game, eh?

 Is to revere Dr. Fauci’s Topp’s card despite that errant opening pitch, while remembering with recrudescent anger that President Woodrow Wilson never uttered one single solitary public word about the 1918 influenza which would, ironically, cause his debilitating stroke.

Swish.  And you might have grown to hate reading like your fellow nobles but for the indulgence of a mentor allowing indolent snatches at Ovid’s Metamorphosis; my savior was a Mr. Snell in sixth grade, who just smiled when catching me dawdling with The Natural during his basal math lessons.

 Is to kneel for eight minutes and forty-six seconds before the National Anthem.

 Swish. You contend that at “dancing, tennis, wrestling, [you] have never been able to acquire any but very slight and ordinary ability; at fencing vaulting, and jumping, none at all,” but your every sentence speaks gymnastics. And you, modest one, were an inveterate horseman.

 Is to discover that in 1918 Babe Ruth, presaging The Curse of the Pandimo, went 13 and 7 and hit .300 with eleven home runs.

Swish.  Micheau, was your sport colored by the tragic fate of your soldier brother,  hit by an innocuous court-tennis ball a bit above his right ear,  dying of apoplexy five or six hours later sans contusion or wound?

Is to watch Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old and grasp why the mandatory 1918 draft sent “many ballplayers,” patriots rightly horrified by trench warfare, “scurrying for jobs that were ‘essential,’” according to John N. Barry’s The Great Influenza.

Swish. Montaigne, you had some stones. When the plague zone reached your Tower in August of 1586 you became a homeless wanderer, leading a small caravan from your estate for six miserable months, unable to settle, forgoing your Essays, having to “take to road again as soon as any one of us felt so much as a pain in the tip of his finger.”

Is a childhood daydream listening to velvety Vin Scully — Davis goes back, a WAY back, to the wall — she’s gone! — before awaking to the piped-in nightmare of the ball rending asunder a cardboard cutout in the left field stands.

 Swish. In case of contact, the quarantine was forty days and forty nights, while you were “grieved to see the bodies of the dead scattered about the fields at the mercy of the wild beasts, which quickly overran the country.” Healthy folks would “dig their own graves betimes,” whilst “others lay down in them while still alive.”

Is to not whistle past the grave fact that after only eight days of Major League Baseball a full 20 percent of the games are postponed.

 Swish. My dear Montaigne, you said you were only made fearful those six months by the onus to “bear with the suffering of others,” because you carried your own “antidotes within me — which are resolution and patience.” Might you help us out a little here? We need an antidote, for our-center-is-not-holding, that’s for sure, but surely you’ve got something less below the Mendoza line, less bromide-like than resolution and patience?

Is to swat at locusts.

Clank!!  “Some groovy scene, all-timer school record and all little man…” said the hippie child DJ with a rainbow-dappled microphone from the community radio station….

“Oh that’s not so boss,” I told him, sounding like I’d just caught The Red Balloon, and then I went… 248163264128256512102420484096…droning on…oblivious…doubling digits into the many-too-many millions…like a precocious 1970 poster child for Ritalin.

Is to aver that even in virulent times it feels essential work to confess that my Winnie Cooper, the prettiest and smartest and fastest girl in the whole world, froze into an embarrassed frown at this new nerdy boy crazed with cooties. For to sport right now is to shelter in this place, to allow that, in memory’s cardboard cutouts, I am still that boy and she still that girl.

Dale Rigby, when not coaching nonfiction prose and trying to sell that Montaigne had some stones within the MFA program at Western Kentucky University, may be found on the golf course sporting black and gold headcovers from his beloved Iowa Hawkeyes. Among others, his essays have appeared in Sport LIterate, Fourth Genre, Iowa Review, Writing on the Edge, and Under the Sun.