Uncategorized

My Cuppa Coffee

by Anne Barney

I had my cuppa coffee in the bigs.
It tasted of air travel,
instead of Greyhound,
and hotel rooms
where the bathmats
weren’t made of paper.

It tasted of a meal
I hadn’t bought at a bus station,
and a uniform with a number
I’d never worn before,
one I’ll play
in the next Powerball drawing.

It tasted of a moment
when the crowd was louder
and the light was brighter,
but not bright enough
to turn hard cheese
to a beach ball.

It tasted of a moment
back in high school
when I finally got that girl
in the back seat,
but she said no,
and started to cry.

My cuppa coffee in the bigs
was hot and sweet to the taste,
but it burned my throat
goin’ down,
and it’s kept me awake
ever since.

Anne Barney is a poet, grant writer, and pastel artist in Rehoboth Beach, Delaward. She is author of four books of poetry: After the Barn Door Opened (Pudding House Publications, 2007), Nosegay (Pudding House Publications, 2002), Pinned to the Corkboard (Pudding House Publications, 2000) and Stolen Joy: Healing After Infertility and Infant Loss (Icarus Books, 1993). Her work has appeared in regional and national publications, including the Maryland Poetry Review, Antietam Review, Pudding Magazine, Chiron Review, and Little Patuxent Review. She thanks Jack and Jill magazine for first recognizing her poetry with an honorable mention when she was nine years old.

Driving Range

by Chris Abbate

Like monks in a scriptorium
leaning into their labor,
we are a perfect row of men,
each in his own hitting bay,
an oasis of concentration:
legs shoulder-width apart,
hands below the chin,
gripping the club gently, as if holding a bird.

Except for the occasional grunt,
feathered curse,
or sigh of disapproval,
we have taken a vow of silence.

We should have mastered it by now,
a simple rotation of the shoulders and hips,
a half-orbit around a white, dimpled sphere:
each ball a petition,
an agent of self-worth
we launch into this graveyard
of lofty expectations.

From a distance, one would wonder
what we are trying to prove
or disprove: a defiance of gravity,
a delaying of the inevitable descent to earth.
We have our own definitions
of madness, every swing closer
to the ten thousand required for perfection.

Hitting a golf ball should be easier than this,
easier than balancing a mortgage and marriage.
And sometimes it is,
like the times it feels effortless,
when the actor and action become one,
the way love feels at first,
the tiny moon of a man
rising above the tree line,
cresting into an arc of satisfaction,
a confluence of toil and desire
he points to and says,
Look. Look what I can do.

 

 

Chris Abbate’s poems have appeared in Connecticut River Review, Chagrin River Review, Timberline Review, and Comstock Review, among other journals. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net award and has received awards in the Nazim Hikmet and North Carolina Poetry Society poetry contests. His first book of poetry, Talk About God, was published by Main Street Rag in September 2017. Chris received his master’s in English from Southern Connecticut State University. He is a database programmer for a pharmaceutical company in Raleigh and since 2009 he has served as a volunteer coach for The First Tee of the Triangle golf program. Chris resides in Holly Springs, North Carolina.

Out in the Open

by Linnie Greene

At the Mets-Willets Point stop in Flushing, Queens, there are only two kinds of people, emblematized on a sign that reads “baseball” then “tennis,” which arrows pointing opposite directions. “Ahh, the two genders,” I thought as I turned right and down a long wooden boardwalk that dead-ended at the entrance to the Billie Jean King Tennis Center. That’s where I met Dad, who had carted a plastic bag full of Lance crackers and granola bars on the pre-dawn flight from North Carolina in case we got hungry mid-set. He splayed them proudly on a bench where he’d waited for me, the sky just lightening from an early morning gray.

The complex itself resembles a large, well-appointed shopping mall. On the left, a Polo store with emblematized rugby shirts and pleated skirts; on the right, a row of fast-casual dining options. Between were gazebos selling t-shirts and commemorative merchandise, and scattered throughout the park were other sirens beckoning the wealthy — brand-name European espresso, BMWs parked on display, Chase financial kiosks that doled out portable loaner phone chargers. The engineers of the last great recession are generous with their loaners, it turns out.

Things were branded more overtly than they were at the tennis clubs of my youth, but the feeling was much the same. I was wearing a pair of $2 plaid shorts from the Prospect-Lefferts Gardens thrift store and salmon pink Lacoste I’d ordered secondhand, thinking I’d show up as a parody, the caddy in a stoner comedy. Instead, I just looked like an imposter. Everyone else sported sleek, expensive workout wear, their stony calves suctioned into Lululemon or Nike as if they themselves might be called upon to sub in. If Serena couldn’t play, there were brave Peytons and Christinas from Long Island waiting in the wings to take her place.

Tennis has been a presence in my life since infancy, like television news or airport Chili’s: peripheral, mostly, but remarkably consistent. As a diapered child in Florida, I pointed to the boxy television and mistook men in the broadcast for my father and his singles partner. “Daddy, Todd. Daddy, Todd,” I helpfully explained as the professionals lobbed the ball back and forth.

In the suburbs, no one grunts like they do on TV. Affluent people in the gated North Carolina community where my stepmother lived when she and my Dad started dating tended instead toward chatter and collegial laughter, their strokes more languid, unhurried and unbothered. Money doesn’t buy happiness, but it buys leisure. I never noticed a competitive edge, but then again, I only really paid attention from the corner of my eye, Discman playing Everclear, ordering French fries at the walk-up grill.

At my mom’s house in the same county, grass sprouted through the subdivision’s old clay courts defiantly; they were largely unused save for preteen boys horsing around on skateboards. The same facility takes on a different purpose depending on what surrounds it: the long-limbed unfussed versus the young and delinquent, elegant looping driveways versus squat two-bedrooms flush with gravel roads. In certain circles, “The Club” is synecdoche for an entire social sphere, and in others, it means nothing at all, just like “love” to a tennis player.

And because of these distinctions, it’s always seemed like those who belong can sniff out those, like me, who don’t. I possessed some ineffable quality that made me other, and it was never a matter of having the right shoes. My K-Swiss phase was short-lived, like two misplaced boats on my feet. I wanted to like Lilly Pulitzer more than the Paul Frank t-shirts from Delia’s with the monkey covering my prepubescent chest. I was both pained by and proud of the awkwardness I felt in places that capitalized the C in club, and then later at a big state school renowned for its athletics. It was not only that I could not really fit in but that I had no desire to. Tennis emblematizes a lot of the difficulty I felt in a particular wedge of the South: snobby, conformist, and married to tradition.

In my family, though, the ardor crops up everywhere, across social and political lines. My mom recently informed me that my aunt, a liberal former history professor, was a nationally-ranked mixed doubles player who served on the USTA committee. My dad plays weekly against hot shots half his age and volunteers swatting practice balls to my alma mater’s collegiate team. My parents’ own failed marriage began on courts in Mandeville, Louisiana, where they met reaching for Abita beer samples over the net. In a way, I owe my entire existence to the human proclivity for smacking a neon yellow ball into a narrow rectangle. That, and booze.

The booze in this particular corner of Flushing was of a decidedly different variety — $25 glasses of Moët-Chandon and botanical, effervescent cocktails. I saw fewer tattoos than any crowd in which I’d mingled for the past five years.

But as much as I felt like one planted in an alien land, that in itself was a familiar sensation, so I shrugged it off and followed Dad to the seats he’d secured mid-level near the courts. Knowing only a handful of tennis stars to begin with, I was oblivious to everyone who walked onto the rectangle of DecoTurf, but Dad’s commentary in my ear ran constantly, a pleasant tickertape.

“That’s John Isner,” he’d say while a presumably friendly giant bounced a ball against his racquet. “He’s from Greensboro.” There were never more than two degrees of separation from my father and the professional athletes on the court — they knew a tennis pro he knew, or their wife had looked at property he sold, or they played a tournament in Winston-Salem he’d attended, or their husband had coached his buddy back when he had played the circuit.

It was much like if I’d brought a relative along to a literary festival, enumerating the talents and dramas of the people who lurked around Brooklyn clinging to their manuscripts and complexes. “She got long-listed for a Booker and dated Jonathan Franzen’s assistant,” I might say, the largest difference being that everyone in earshot would be five foot two and taking antidepressants.

We rotated between matches and paused occasionally for overpriced Cokes. Tennis might be the only place where die-hards are more identifiable by their decorum than their lack of it; no one brandished signs or statement tees, the WASPy fear of tackiness manifest in all the khaki and sweat-wicking athleisure. Tennis, perhaps, is a last bastion of snobbery, growing to include minorities but drawing the line at people without taste. “The only taste she has is in her mouth,” my roommate’s mother is known to say, and I thought of this and pulled my new U.S. Open bucket hat further onto my head.

I could appreciate that aspect, at least. Even if my taste was an outlier, at least it wasn’t gauche; I can palate neutrals more easily than the kitsch of a Yankee’s fan or the showiness of the monied courtside at a Lakers game. The U.S. Open attracts rich people who intimidate not by throwing their affluence in your face but by adopting the cool confidence of someone who doesn’t need to brag, who has transcended such juvenilia. It’s just like the tech that suffused my West Coast life — the people in the vests making more than the woman with the Louis Vuitton purse, leaving the rest of us to chart those class nuances like high school gossips.

As the afternoon progressed it got hotter, and half the seats at any given match were in the direct glare of the sun. Dad pulled sunscreen from one his many Ziplocs and we reapplied.

I preferred to watch the women — rooting for Kazakh Zarina Diyas’s expressive game against the stoic Karolina Pliskova, to whom she barely lost. Holding my breath as American Sabrina Vickery lengthened her arm skyward and lobbed a serve over the net at Elina Svitolina. The impossible elegance of such quick movement, the way an angled racquet could make the ball touch down on a minute square inch.

Later, we ventured into the upper tiers of Louis Armstrong to watch minute versions Andy Murray and James Duckworth, like peering down at a diorama in a museum or a child’s set of matchbox cars.

It’s hard to know the last time my father and I shared anything about our inner lives. In adulthood, unlike childhood, we’ve achieved pleasantness, an anodyne and palatable state wherein we talk on the phone about once a month and text in the meantime — about the weather, a meme of a golden retriever, some distant relative’s new baby. We only occasionally broach politics and I made the mistake of buying him Hillbilly Elegy, a book he loved, before I knew what it was.

He probably finds my predilection for cats, socialism, and baroque thrifted outfits as puzzling as I find the scoring system in tennis, or the reason people play golf. He is a Scorpio, I am a Capricorn. We’re two vastly different people, and yet we share the same eyes and chin. We share the same context, the same knowledge of filling station BLTs and the superiority of certain mountain towns. For a day at the end of August, he shared the thing he loved most, and in his open enthusiasm, the enveloping quality of this sport in his life, I felt I knew him a little bit better.

Dad flew South again the same night he flew up, retreating quickly to his own job and the comfort of home, with its beagles and tree-dense solitude. It was as if he feared voyaging North too long might make him acquire a taste for absinthe or rideshare services. Later that summer, I would find out we had bed bugs and spend a weekend crying into plastic vacuum bags; he would tend to his ailing mother, situated in a nursing home in the Appalachians.

When the coverage came out about the final match — a tense set between Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka that culminated in a series of questionable (racist) calls around Williams’ comportment — I was the first to text, clicking between several open tabs. “Can you believe this?” I said, in essence, tapping out a screed against racism, sexism, and the umpire in particular. A few minutes later, he replied, exasperated for altogether different reasons — something about sportsmanship, the embarrassment of chaos. We had found a new lingua franca. In the late East Coast summer, we had reached over the net and across the years, and unlike love in a tennis match, it meant something, even if I couldn’t tabulate the score.

 

Linnie Greene grew up in Durham, North Carolina and lives in Jersey City, New Jersey. She’s contributed to GQ, The New York Times, Pitchfork, and others, and is at work on a novel about art and jobs. Find her online at linniegreene.com, or at home with three cats, watching “Twin Peaks.”

Doubleheader

by Jeffrey Alfier

Thanksgiving. I listen to the final voicemail
my father left me, third week of September,

autumn but a hint fanning the heat of late summer.
He says he’s fallen again, this time in the kitchen

while leaning on my mother’s chair —
the woman who’d left three years ago

in a morphine sleep. I enter the house
and he appears unhurt — a toppled but intact statue

who’d found himself at a right angle to gravity.
I am angry with him for no discernibly sane reason.

But I don’t let it show. He wears that stupid red sweater,
as winterworn as a fugitive’s.

Lifting him is lifting a sparrow, so frail now
he leaves no footfalls. I take him upstairs,

settle him in his chair and we watch
a ballgame together — a late doubleheader.

He will fall again before the final inning,
relievers in the bullpen, warming up,

and staring at the rain.

 

Jeffrey Alfier’s most recent book is Gone This Long: Southern Poems (2019). The Shadow Field, another poetry collection, is forthcoming from Louisiana Literature Press (2020). His publication credits include The Carolina Quarterly, Chiron Review, Copper Nickel, Midwest Quarterly, Permafrost, Southern Poetry Review, and Sport Literate. He is founder and co-editor of Blue Horse Press and San Pedro River Review.

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.

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.

Waiting on Deck

by Jay Lesandrini

I’m kneeling in the on-deck circle with two outs in the ninth, and we’re losing again. Losing by a lot, and all I want is one more at bat. Eighteen years of playing baseball is coming down to this — one more chance to stand in the batter’s box. The sun is dipping behind the trees in left field, and what had been a warm Sunday afternoon in late April has become something much colder. If I were sitting in the dugout with two or three guys waiting ahead of me to hit, I’d already be past this. I’d be thinking about getting back to my off-campus apartment and drinking a cold beer, or I’d be thinking that I still have to read The American for my Lit final next week. I’ve been putting it off all semester. I hate Henry James.

Instead, I’m here in the on-deck circle and I reach down, grab the pine-tar rag, tacky the bat handle with optimism. The batter takes ball one. I shout at him. Tell him to make the pitcher work. Suggest to him that the pitcher’s getting tired. Urge him to make sure it’s a strike before he swings. But I know he’s not listening. And I’m not really talking to him, anyway. I’m talking to the pitcher. I want to get inside this guy’s head. I want him to be thinking about me instead of the batter. He knows the game is over. He knows he’s got a long bus ride home and wants to get started as soon as possible.

He throws a breaking ball that freezes the batter, and looks low and away to me. The umpire calls a strike. It’s getting cold out here for him too.

I look into the visitor’s dugout and they are all laughing at the call. They start to bag up their equipment. Everyone wants the game to end except for me — and the guy in the batter’s box. The pitcher reaches back and brings the high hard stuff, and I can see the batter’s eyes turn into saucers. There’s something about a high fastball that makes you want to take a bite of that grapefruit as it dances up to the plate.

A swing and a miss. The count is one and two, and I know that the pitcher’s coming back with another high fastball. I give the batter the benefit of my wisdom, but he still isn’t listening. The pitch is head high, right down central and I see that moment of hesitation in the batter’s knees right before his bat comes forward. I’m already walking back toward the dugout when I hear the slight ping of cowhide glancing off aluminum, and the hopeful chink of the ball hitting the fence behind us. There’s still a chance for one more at bat.

I pick up the pine tar rag and stand there wringing it in my hands like a widow at a wake. I think about the afternoon when I was four years old and my mother stood behind me and shaped my fingers onto a bat handle for the first time. I think about the first game I played in the 12-year-old league when I was only nine, and how I was so scared that I bunted with the bases loaded. I think about all the nights after practice in high school waiting for the city bus to take me home, while my friend’s parents picked them up. I think about passing up the opportunity to go to Marquette because they didn’t have a baseball team, and about the day my high school coach told me that Butler University was offering me a scholarship. It all comes down to this.

It comes down to me waiting in the on-deck circle, hoping the guy at the plate, a junior who still has another year to play, will find his way on base and give me one last opportunity to hit a baseball. There is nothing in the balance. No record to be set. No game to be won to extend a season. This is it.

Eighteen years of playing baseball and I could never hit a slider. I could never pick up that tight rotation of the seams in time to recognize the pitch… until now. I see the ball leave the pitcher’s hand and watch the batter swing at a pitch that would strike me out.

The instant that the ball comes off his bat, I imagine the pitcher being undressed like Charlie Brown as the ball whizzes by his head. Then I hear the snap of cowhide on leather. Charlie Brown isn’t pitching today.

I feel the weight of 18 years of baseball drop in my stomach, and I kneel down to catch my breath, using the bat as a cane to keep me upright. On his way to the dugout the batter pats me on the back and tells me that he’s sorry, and I know that he really means it.

As I think back now, 20 some years later, I don’t remember what happened during the last at bat of my baseball career, I only remember waiting in the on deck circle hoping that it would never end.

Jay Lesandrini holds an MFA in creating writing from Butler University. His publications include Bluestem, Booth, Caesura, Mythic Indy, Punchnel’s, and Sport Literate. His essay “Waiting on Deck,” won our 2010 essay contest and was also named a notable essay in the Best American Sports Writing 2011. He lives in Carmel, Indiana, and is the Director of Communications and Marketing at Indiana University-Purdue University Columbus, where he also teaches writing.

 

SL contest history

Over nearly 30 years in print, we have held a number of essay and poetry contests. On the essay front, more often than not, we pick an SL veteran, sometimes even a previous contest winner, to serve as a guest judge, picking his or her favorite from a short list of anonymous finalists.

We do not have a contest in the works for 2023. In 2022, Virginia Ottley Craighill was the guest judge on a “social justice contest.” Frank Van Zant, our longtime poetry editor, crowned the champion poet. Our two winners: Flavian Mark Lupinetti, for his poem “Wrestling Lake Burn,” and Sydney Lea, for his essay “The Cardinal, the Cops, and the Say-Hey Kid.” Lea’s essay, by the way, earned a notable nod in The Best American Essays 2023.

Some recent contest winners include the following.

• Hal Ackerman, “Concrete Charlie and the Golden Boy” (a “sport short”)
• Dave Fromm, “Tool Town Left to Its Own Devices“
• Matt Hohner, “Mob Hit at the Ark Ramp“

 

Meat Squad

by Peter Stine

I was relaxing in my brother’s kitchen over in Palmer Woods, waiting for him to return from the hospital, when Jack came in from a night class down at Wayne State. Last weekend he’d shaved his head again to make the hair grow back thicker. He sighed heavily and took a place at the table under a large round Faygo clock that glowed purple on the wall.

“Peter, I need a change, and not the minor things. New job, new pussy, the whole thing across the board.”
My sister-in-law walked in with a pile of laundry. “Hi, Jack. How was teaching tonight?”
“Betsy, I walk in there and they haven’t put the chairs around in a circle. Why do I have to ask them every class to put the chairs in a circle? I mean I’m a consistent person.”
Betsy chuckled and went to the cabinet to get some chips. I rolled a couple joints and placed them in the middle of the table. “This is what they would have preferred down at the soup kitchen today.”
“How’s that article coming?” she asked. “For Metropolitan Detroit, right?”
“Sister Mary Watson is a cool lady, Bets. She runs a remarkable shelter. I just hope to draw a little more attention and money her way.”

At that moment Pat arrived back from the hospital. Still thin as a rail after Vietnam, he grabbed a Lowenbrau and joined us at the table. His face was red from exertion.
“Patrick . . .” Jack said, reaching for a joint. “How’s it going?”
“A little busy in the ER,” he said, without elaboration, that mysteriously benign blankness on his face. “There was some basketball practice afterwards. Henry Ford has a team, mostly blacks from the ER. For a completely useless team member, I have quite a following.”

We passed the joint around, and talk meandered from the Boy Scouts to past summer jobs to what we might do with a videotape of Ronald Reagan butt-fucking a chimp, if we uncovered one. The three of us had been meeting regularly for mid-week bull sessions for a year now. This night Pat led us back to sports and some memories of his career as a half-miler in high school.

“I remember the Flint meet best,” he began. “I ran the first 440 in sixty, coasted the next 220, and then waited to see what I had left. Dad had the movie camera rolling. With about a hundred yards to go I started my kick. You knew it was time because these guys with long strides all around me were stretching it out, pulling away. But I had nothing left. Zilch. You feel the legs go rubbery, the vision blurs, and your body stiffens into some hysterical hunchback gasping for air. Your teammates are no help, standing along the track waving towels at you, yelling at you to pump your arms, as more runners are passing you, now pouring over the finish line, the camera recording all . . . On the ride home everybody’s horsing around, while I’m in the back of the bus, a wet towel over my head, puking my cookies into a pail . . . Christ, I remember after the Clio meet I went blind, simply lost my vision for half an hour.”

Maybe it was just dope profundity, but it struck me sitting there that over time jock humiliations like Pat’s became silver trophies, far more precious than memories of victory. It is the losing that unites us. “Buzz, as I remember you had some problems at the Huron Relays too.”

“Yeah, that was my first race on an indoor track, a medley relay, in Ypsilanti. I remember Jim Cooley ran the first 220 and handed me the baton with a thirty-yard lead. I jumped out and ran, entirely alone, just the tic-tic-tic of my shoes on the track. I lost a little ground by the second lap, but was still way ahead. I was really flying. But on the third lap, I went into the curve under the balcony in first place, and came out of the turn in fifth! Teammates on the infield were screaming and waving at me. I had run the whole race in my outside lane . . . It never occurred to me to merge.”

“You were taught as a kid to color inside the lines,” I reminded him. “So what do you expect?”

Jack popped a third of a joint in his mouth, and then leaned back, rubbing his shaven head.

“Pat, we had a defensive football coach in high school who believed that the way you proved you had guts was by spear-tackling, with your head. But at 130 pounds I didn’t want any of that. I remember once I went down to cover a kickoff and cut through traffic to the middle of the field, doing a good job of avoiding people. Suddenly there was a parting of bodies and a guy with the ball was galloping straight toward me. We ran full speed into each other in a straight-up position. I fell back and down as a knee went squarely into my nuts. Then I rolled over and passed out . . .”

“Jack . . . ” Betsy groaned, back at the sink.

“After that I made it clear to the coach: no defense. But it seemed to follow me. In lacrosse, I think it was a Rutgers-Princeton game, I got into an even worse collision. That was enough. I got up and just walked off the field, some guy clubbing me with a lacrosse stick all the way to the sidelines . . .”

Pat put a helmet of hands over his head in sympathy.

“Jack,” he said, “that’s what freshman football at Rumson High in New Jersey was like with my brother at quarterback. The first play of any game Peter would always call my number, 23-halfback dive, you know, just to feel out the defensive line.  And every fucking time I would get creamed, swallowed up in a grunting pile of bodies and choking dust. To this day I remember no pain, just stars, like in the cartoons.”

“Jack, why is he complaining? This was the days of standard T-formation football. Remember that? The end-run option was worse for Patrick. I’d get in trouble, after a few ineffectual fakes on the defensive end, and had to lateral to him as the secondary came charging in full speed. Right as my brother grabbed the ball, about eye level, they’d run his ass over.”

“Then they’d grab my jersey and shoulder pads and whirl me into the yardsticks.”

“You guys,” Betsy said. “These experiences are so violent.”

“Self-inflicted wounds,” Jack said with fatuous solemnity. “Self-inflicted wounds.”

“Look here, Bets.” I pulled up the front of my alligator pullover and pointed to a smooth disc of skin the size of a dime in the middle of my breastbone. “Our locker room at Rumson was about as ventilated as a dungeon. Everything stank. Shoulder pads were always caked with mud or soaked with sweat, rank and stiffening. I was fourteen with acne all over my shoulders, back and chest, and pulling on that equipment was like feeding a fire. So one day I’m sitting on a bench in front of my locker and pop this huge inflamed pimple. I keep pressing the skin around it until there’s a stream of yellow pus running down to my stomach, pooling at my hip, then, no lie, running down the inside of my thigh until it reached my knee! When I wiped away the pus there was a wound in my chest that looked like a bullet hole.”

“That was our assignment on the meat squad,” my brother said, redirecting the conversation. “We were road kill for the varsity during practices. Freshmen or sophomores, totally outsized, in worn-out equipment, yellow tank tops, unnumbered jerseys, battered cleats. Our heads poked out of those oversized shoulder pads like wary turtles… We were pitiful.”

“No,” I said, “we were sacrificial… ”

“I wised up about meat squads long before my brother,” Pat said. “He’s still on the meat squad. After that freshman year I switched to golf.”

***

Elizabeth and our son Alex were asleep when I returned home that night. One remark from the bull session kept sticking in my mind. He’s still on the meat squad. It was therapeutic to linger a while on the sofa, my Labrador beside me, and go back 20-odd years to those first two seasons of football at Rumson High.  How my gut used to fill up with anxiety each day as last period ticked down in study hall. Whether rain or fall sunlight was at the tall auditorium windows, I felt the lassitude of someone about to be ordered to walk in formation across open terrain toward woods alive with the crack of rifle fire. Every afternoon, I watched two rows below me our starting senior guard, a muscular pockmarked gnome named Earl Scholl, hold a cigarette lighter to the seat in front of him and char the wood with fierce concentration. He was just getting ready for practice. Up front the faculty proctor seemed too distracted trying to locate who was arcing pennies high into the air to notice Earl’s work. When the pennies came down with a metallic clank around the auditorium, like toy grenades, a ripple of laughter went up. Anything was possible, even permissible. When the final bell rang, while students flooded out of noisy corridors into airy freedom, I would file down to the locker room.

This was the late Fifties and locker rooms were a logical command post for preparing young American boys to be fed into the meat grinder of an inevitable war with Soviet Russia. They were cramped, filled with a gray din, like a crowded holding cell in some county jail. Despite the chorus of curses and jokes, slamming metal doors, the mood was somber among the meat squad. I would file out with the others into the slant light of afternoon, cleats clicking on the asphalt as we walked across a parking lot to the practice field. The distant goalposts stuck into the sky like lances. There the team loitered on a grassy knoll to await the arrival of Coach Rosotti. The meat squad stayed apart, like orphans. I remember how the woods beyond the field stood silent and remote, autumn leaves a lovely quilt of red and yellow, almost mystical, having nothing to do with football.

Memories of the meat squad kept surfacing in my mind, causing a quick, unexpected anxiety. I got up to pour myself a glass of bourbon, and then went back to the sofa.

When practice started, the team operated as a unit, stretching, doing jumping jacks, running laps, going though formational drills. It was like a wholesome boot camp. But soon the drills became violent. There were no facemasks on the helmets then, and I dreaded in particular the tackling drill. Two dummies were set up about four yards apart, and two lines faced each other on either side of the opening. At the sound of the whistle, a player at the head of one line ran with the football between the dummies. The player at the head of the other line did a somersault and met the charging runner in the opening. One afternoon I came out of a somersault late and rose up to catch a knee square in the face. I got up groggy and went to the back of the other line, where Mr. Early, the high school principal, who had stopped by to watch practice, started talking to me long enough to recognize I was standing up but out cold. I had a cracked cheekbone and concussion, and the next two days were a permanent hole in my memory. But meat was not expected to think.

In the second half of practice the meat squad scrimmaged the varsity. On offense I played the quarterback of the next opponent, Matawan or Point Pleasant, and whether handing off to a running back, running the option, or dropping back to pass, I was leveled. Every play was the same play: the signal count, then soft crunch of shoulder pads, confused yells and grunts, then contact like the rush of a train, a distant whistle, and the quiet weight of bodies piled on top of me. It wasn’t much different on defense, where I played cornerback. Billy Lewis, with a gang of blockers, was always breaking through a giant hole in the line and stampeding toward me. Maybe 5-10 and 140 pounds at the time, I just toppled over backwards and reached up to grab feet and legs as they ran over my body. Scrimmage offered the meat squad the pure experience of enduring blows.

When it grew dark, the team would huddle around the coaches for strategy sessions, the meat squad on the margins, a ghostly irrelevance now. But sometimes we were summoned to take more. Once, when the varsity was ordered back on the field to return kickoffs, I jogged down in coverage and was blind-sided by John Kunce, our best lineman and 240 pounds. I lay on my back in the torn grass, never wanting to move, feeling the relief of the dead. When I opened my eyes, there was the towering figure of Coach Rosotti staring down at me. On his mafia face was a look of the most exquisite compassion. John was staring down as well, innocent and uncomprehending. It was the closest I have ever come to being welcomed into heaven.

Once practice was over, back in the locker room, all the pain was replaced by the deepest sense of solidarity I had known. For the meat squad, the challenge had been met and we were still alive. Even the varsity players seemed to treat us like comrades-in-arms. The shower room, with its broken nozzles, chipped tiles, billows of steam, was abuzz with jokes and horseplay. Earl stood under a shower talking with the team captain, Paul Dobrowski, a James Dean look-a-like whose attentions kept the fawning lineman from realizing that the captain was pissing on his leg. For the meat squad, this was a restoration of justice. When he looked down, Earl jumped back, went berserk, and everyone broke up. We were inside the magic circle.

At the varsity games on Saturday afternoons, I recorded all the plays on a clipboard from the sidelines. I also tended to the injured. When Bobby Clark went down with a torn-up knee against Red Bank Catholic, I was a crutch, helping him to the bench, where he wept in pain in a litter of plastic cups, chewed orange rinds, and ultimate neglect. In a brutal away game against Sayreville, played on a field that storms had turned into a prairie of mud and standing water, I watched as our backup defensive end, Rob Hamilton, entered the game in the second half wearing a clean uniform – a splash of Technicolor in a world of indistinguishable brown shapes. But this was no mark of transcendence, rather an irresistible target for the Sayreville linemen. They jeered as Rob crouched into position. He came off the field a play later with his two upper front teeth knocked out. On the bus ride home, I sat next to him as he clamped his mouth into a blood-soaked towel.

I never played varsity football at Rumson High. My family moved to Michigan my junior year, where I quarterbacked another high school team, pretty well, until late in my senior season my career ended the way John Kunce started it – a blind-side hit after the whistle, blowing out my knee. But that seemed fated too. I was still on the meat squad. Nothing matched the existential edge of being aligned with a hopeless cause, the voluntary martyrdom of joining it, the complexity of surviving it. This was formative, and left me with an irrepressible, if distorted way of viewing events outside the chalk lines.

“I was an awful dope when I went into the last war,” Ernest Hemingway wrote. “I can remember just thinking that we were the home team and the Austrians were the visiting team.” This classical analogy between war and sport, a tragic confusion of realms, was drowned in carnage. A British captain, W. P. Nevill, led his men at the Somme attack by dribbling a soccer ball up to the German front lines. He was killed instantly, as was the spirit he embodied, by an engagement that cost the British 60,000 killed and wounded that day, for an advance of a hundred yards – the length of a football field. General Haig declared the battle a success.

The same sentiment resurfaced in my twenties, during the civil rights struggle in the South. Meridian, Selma, Orangeburg. I was drawn down there upon reading in Paris, in The International Herald Tribune, of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodwin, an early meat squad of the Congress of Racial Equality, being murdered by the Klan in Mississippi. The moral rightness of this struggle was self-evident, with a clear underdog, an engagement no more complicated than wanting to beat Sayerville. Only one injunction here: put your body on the line. Passive but resistant meat, something I understood. Beaten by whites in a Meridian bus station, only to be rescued by two black Vietnam vets returning home on leave. On the back steps of Brown’s chapel in Selma, keeping watch against marauding whites, an unloaded rifle on my lap. On the streets of Montgomery, arrested after being thrown through the window of a department store. On the sidewalks of Orangeburg, the first white guy to teach at South Carolina State College, blocked by a giant barber with a razor, a Klansman without his hood, eyes glinting from two cups of flab. None of this matched the terror of a Mississippi summer. But I suspect its leader, Bob Moses, put an end to the strategy when it became clear that someone on the meat squad, especially when white, became a far more useful symbol when dead. Yet what I remembered was the holy sense of community.

Over those years I watched the U.S. military in Vietnam prove less merciful with their “search and destroy” missions. Dump teenage grunts into the trap-laden, mine-filled, guerrilla-controlled jungle, and once they were ambushed, call in the napalm. An anti-war activist in the South, it was my shame to recognize only later that the grunts of Vietnam were the tragic meat squad of my generation: brothers sacrificed for nothing, 58,000 of them, including Earl Scholl, one way or another wasted, greased, iced, their poetic language for death a reminder of their physical mortality, an antidote to the Orwellian lies that justified the war. As I saw it, the war came to an end only when the nation woke up to white middle-class KIAs coming back in body bags, while the meat squads in-country mutinied through drugs and fragging. And as for the returning vets, twice as many committed suicide after the war as those killed in Vietnam itself, as if in loyalty to fallen comrades, as if survival guilt could be purged by death alone.

Afterwards a member of any meat squad carries off a dangerous respect for loss, for what could success possibly mean now? Lethargy settles in that in my case bordered on immobilization. An absence that is really loyalty to what has passed. Across the room from me, on the shelf of a bookcase was a framed picture of my mother. Last year I had leaned over her casket in Florida and kissed her cheek, firm and cold as marble. I had been away a year and a half, failed to reach her side in time. The same mother who, rightly fearful of meat squads, failed to see how her own open heart had inspired her children to volunteer. The same mother who, after dinner was over and my homework done, would apply sulfur compresses to the acne on my back and shoulders. The same mother who, every morning for the three months of the football season, was always there to help me out of bed I was so sore.

Peter Stine is the author of The Art of Survival (Rocky Shore Books), a collection of literary essays on Isaac Babel, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad. Regent Press published a collection of his short stories in 2019. His fiction, poetry, nonfiction and journalism have appeared in many publications, including The Threepenny Review, The Iowa Review, Boulevard, The Gettysburg Review, North American Review, The Antioch Review, Crazyhorse, Chicago Quarterly Review, Sport Literate, The New York Times, and Harold Bloom’s Modern Critical Views. He is the editor of four books: The Sixties (Wayne State University Press), On Nature’s Terms (Texas A&M University Press), Sports in America (Wayne State University Press), and The Best of Witness: 1987-2007 (Michigan State University Press).