Boxes, boxes and more boxes

[Arroyos]

Boxes, boxes and more boxes


The names rolled in like waves to the shore. Or maybe, the names piled up like bodies during the Black Plague. No, that’s too ominous. How about: the names multiplied like rabbits? Cheerier, but not befitting a ball club. The names filled the box like fans filling a stadium? Better. Keep at it, he thought, you’ll get it.

Slummings munched on a juicy Honeycrisp apple. Sweet and crunchy. Where were these apples when he was a kid? All he could remember were red delicious (that tasted like bad applesauce) and golden delicious (that had little or no taste at all). He’d have to ask John where these Honeycrisps came from. John would know. John knows apples.

Slummings wrote a note to remind himself to contact John Rodriguez, the man responsible for dragging Slummings out of the gutter and back into the game. Yes, he thought, about time he reconnected with John.

Meanwhile, he took another bite of the apple and imagined all the names piling up in the Front Office. He had provided the box himself, a former Colorado River Water box someone left in his owner’s box high above the infield. Boxes inside boxes, he thought. The logo on the box showed blue water swerving around the words “Colorado River” and beneath that, “Bottled by the Yuma Bulldozer Baseball Club.” Slummings had taken his black Sharpie and blacked out the word “Bulldozer,” then added a big question mark above the black rectangle he’d just made. He’d placed the box in a prominent position in the middle of the front office. Each evening, the Acting GM (of the former Bulldozers), Roberta Tipitina, collected the names from the slips of paper deposited in the box during the day and typed them into a computer, added them to names submitted via email and printed them all out. (The computer was just another box, Slummings thought, albeit a very talented box.) Roberta then tacked each day’s list to the bulletin board (a nearly one dimensional box), directly beneath the empty space where the name Bulldozers had resided before it was torn off by Taffy Slummings.

Slummings hadn’t been seen in the office since he announced the contest to rename Yuma’s baseball team. He knew if he showed up Roberta would remind him of what he said about a raise for her. And he knew he’d have to give her one because she was good … no, because she was indispensable. He was never going to be able to run this club without her. In fact, if he were honest with himself, he’d admit he didn’t run the club, she did. He owned the team and he was going to rename them—and the goddamn stadium, he thought—but he wasn’t running anybody. Even the team’s third base coach had more to do with running the club than Slummings. He just paid the bills. Which gave him the right to name the damn team, or so he believed.

Thinking of the third base coach waving runners home made Slummings realize that the baseball diamond was a kind of box too, a box standing on its bottom corner, which runners ran around the edges of while fielders tried to get the ball back to the bottom of the box before the runners got there. He began to wonder if his brain was playing tricks on him? Will it turn everything into a box? He shook his head to clear it.

Each night after Roberta had posted the day’s names and left for home, Slummings sneaked down into the Front Office and made a copy of the day’s list, which he carried back up to the owner’s box, where he was both living—temporarily—and working permanently, he hoped. (His owner’s suite at the stadium, Slummings realized, was not just another box within a box, but more like a home within a box.) With the same Sharpie he used to mark up the water bottle box, he began crossing out proposed names he couldn’t possibly live with.

First to go were the fruit and vegetable names, like Alfalfas, Cottons, Wheatgrass, Watermelons, and Lettuceheads.

Just because the city of Yuma celebrated the New Year by dropping a giant head of iceberg lettuce onto Main Street didn’t mean Slummings was going to name his club after rabbit food!

Then all the derogatory names that angry or disappointed fans submitted, like Losers, Flushers, Turds, Shittites, and Crapolas. Slummings rather liked the sound of that last one, but the nicknames it would engender made his face scrunch up in displeasure.

There were names associated with Yuma’s history as the first site for the Territorial Prison, like Criminals, Prisoners, Lifers and Guards, but Slummings had no desire to evoke those sordid times. In fact, he hoped someday to buy up the land the former prison sat on, currently home to the Territorial Prison Museum, and build a new stadium on the bluff overlooking the river. For the time being, he preferred ignoring this part of Yuma’s history. Besides, he realized, a prison was just another sort of box, and not one he wanted to be reminded of.

What was left when he crossed out those names? Hundreds of standard sports teams names, like the Tigers and Giants and Rattlers, all of which Slummings removed with his Sharpie simply because they were so obvious, so traditional, and so common. He wanted something unique. Which allowed him to retain all the Native American names associated with the Indians of the Mojave Desert: Quechan, Cocopah, Hualapai, Mohave, and Maricopas. Problem was, the name Yuma itself was a native word for the local tribe, so it seemed redundant to name them twice. And if one of them were chosen, Slummings figured he’d have to have Native approval to use it, and the local tribal leaders had never had a good relationship with the ball club.

Another group of names that popped up repeatedly were various words for Mexican food: Tacos, Taquitos, Tortillas, Burritos, Albondigas, Frijoles and Nachos were the most frequently nominated. But Slummings suspected that someone had been stuffing the box (Can I never escape boxes? he thought), and he was pretty sure he knew who. The local Taco Truck owner— Anna was the only name Slummings had ever known her by—had been calling and leaving messages for him every day, campaigning for a name that would boost her sales and reminding him that he owed her. Anna had fed Slummings from her Taco Truck during the long, lonely stretch when he lived on the streets of Yuma. Once, when he’d swallowed a bottle of cheap booze and lay down in the gutter to die, it was Anna who dragged him out of the gutter, poured Yuma’s bottled Colorado River Water down his gullet and fed him beans and rice until he revived.

Though he owed her his life, Slummings didn’t think naming his club the Tacos was how he should repay her. But he liked the idea of a Spanish name, both to acknowledge the majority Hispanic population but also because it sounded, to Slummings’ ears at least, exotic. So he allowed names like Rios and Coyotes and Colorados and Los Desiertos to remain. That last one he genuinely liked, as he did all the names that evoked the Southwest landscape: Sand Dunes, Arroyos, Montañas, Playas, Loma, even Desert Rats and River Rats. Any of those, Slummings could live with, and when he was done blacking out the unacceptable names from Roberta’s list, it was those names that predominated.

That made the silver-bearded old man smile. In a way, he thought, I have just escaped from all the boxes trying to contain me. A new name for a new man!

He hadn’t heard back from the Commissioner’s Office on his phone call informing them of the method by which he was going to rename the former Bulldozers, but then he didn’t really expect to hear until he had a new name to announce. Then it was going to get dicey. If the Commish liked the new name, well, good, no sweat. But if he didn’t, if the Commish objected to the name, if he refused to authorize Slummings to rename his club, well then, there would be a showdown. And that, he realized, is just another box to be gotten out of.

Boxes! Apparently he couldn’t stop thinking about boxes. And boxes reminded him of the infamous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, which took place a mere 300 miles east of Yuma. The Clanton and McLaury boys were gunned down by the Earps and Doc Holliday in a cramped alley a block or more from the famous corral, a sort of box created by adjacent buildings. And that box became a casket for 3 of the gunmen that day. The so-called Cowboys were no more than six feet away from the lawmen and roughly 30 shots were fired, yet none of Earp’s group was killed (three were wounded) while 3 of the Cowboys died before the other 3 hightailed it outa there. Slummings often wondered what was wrong with the Cowboys’ guns. Six feet away, firing maybe 15 shots, and they killed no one? But he understood why the other 3 Cowboys ran for their lives. Sometimes he wanted to run too, away from and out of all the boxes boxing him in. So, thinking about his phone call to the Commissioner, Slummings knew he had to be tactful while crossing swords with the Commish or he’d be spending more time in the newly refurbished “boxes” in the Justice Department’s Detainment Center. And those were boxes he never wanted to see again.

But this box, he said to himself looking around the spatial accommodations of the owner’s suite, this box ain’t so bad. He smiled, and realized that if he wanted to stay in this box, and not be returned to those other boxes, he’d better pick the perfect name, one that makes himself happy and one that the Commissioner won’t object to. That’s what I gotta do, he thought.

Then he remembered he wasn’t the only one making the decision, so he’d have to arrange things so that the Front Office staff agreed with his choice of names, and that wasn’t going to be easy. How do you persuade a group of people—all younger than you, all envious of your wealth—that what you want is also what they want?

Slummings mulled that over for a few minutes, then settled on something that soothed his troubled mind. You remind them, subtly, indirectly even, that you pay their salaries and that their agreeing with your choice might be beneficial to their careers.

Yes, that’s how you get people to do what you want them to do! Good old fashioned self-interest, which is just a fancy way of saying, you put them in a box. A box you design. A box you control. Like the box sitting in the middle of the Front Office. The box with the names nominated by local fans. A box Slummings raided every night to make sure only acceptable names were left in it.

That, he thought, is how you get out of the box. By building a better box.