A Deal. Imminent.
Daily Log of a Fresh-faced Graduate
April 30, 2013
The next day, we get up early and weave along the Salton Sea and through Bombay Beach to Mecca. I like the sight of small houses and skiffs being pulled from behind pickups. I like the sight of trees alongside the road that extend their branches out over the concrete as if to protect it from the rain that seems to never come.
For her part, I think Annie enjoys the new pace, too. Her engine is deep and throaty, and the buffeting of the wind over her exposed top is warmer and calmer. Even Don-o seems happy. “She’s one sexy thing, eh?” he says, running his hand over the splitting seems of her driver’s seat door.
I agree. For the first day in awhile, I’m not sipping from a Corona and I don’t think about dropping A, and for the first time I have a thought about Mezzy that doesn’t feel morose or crappy. Instead, all I think is, “I bet Mezzy would think this is pretty cool,” and it feels right. Then Dani California comes on the radio, and both Don-o and I break out the best voices we’ve got and sing along at the top of our lungs. By the time we get to Indio, the sun comes out, the radio is blaring and all three of us are ready to run again.
#
It’s under three hours to Palm Springs, and we get there in enough time to grab some Taco Bell and make it into Elderberry Field well before BP starts. I like the park because it’s got lots of angles. The outfield walls are straight sections that fit together like a cage. The bleachers are covered by stadium sections that cut into the sky like scythes. The four playoff pennants that fly along the right field foul pole are triangular and sharp. Unfortunately for Codgers fans, they are also three years old. The place is a throwback in that the outfield walls are plastered with advertisements but no electronic, no flashing crap. No… silliness like that is constrained to little data screens that come with each seat – readouts that let you know who the batter and pitcher are, their past history, and pretty much anything else you want to know about them. The whole place has this weird Mad Men and the Jetsons vibe.
The Codgers carry the fourth largest payroll in the league but still find themselves struggling along, fourth in their division. They come into this game in an early-season bind, having just lost two of three to Bakersfield and having blown a 3-1 lead in yesterday’s game with Tempe. The Knights are back for more today, and if the Codgers can’t beat their division rivals a home, it will be a very long year for these fans. The local media is beginning to give both field manager Takeru Suzuki and General Manager Denny Hills an earful of chatter. In general, my opinion is that things generally don’t end well for the field manager in those situations because… well, because it’s not like Suzuki can fire Hills to show his displeasure with the situation.
To make matters a little more complicated for Hills, three high-salary stalwart Codgers are playing out the last of their contracts. Thirty-two year-old CF John Gustafson is looking solid so far, but 33-year-old LF Michael Smith and 34-year-old Ollie Morris have been looking their ages. The fact that Juan Santos is at the end of his contract has to be of some satisfaction, though, as Santos has been stealing his $5-mil-a-year for some time. The good news here is that this represents over $60 million in future buying power sitting in the bank. The problem, though, is that word “future”. The Codgers revenue stream has been dropping like a bungee jumper for the past two seasons, and the team has been in the red since 2009.
So, yeah, Hills has some thinking to do, and – since I don’t see much help on the horizon – if I’m reading my tea leaves right it smells like a couple of rebuilding years
Anyway, regardless of the fact that we’re in Cali, it’s 54°, the wind chilly as we approach the opening pitch, which was thrown by a girl who had perfect attendance at the local high school. “Brown-noser,” I said.
“Yeah, but you woulda gone to school every day if I could throw out the first pitch at a Warriors game.”
“Maybe.”
“This is me you’re talking to, dude. No flappin’ maybe about it.”
The fact that he was right was actually annoying. I was cold. The beer hadn’t helped and we were under a cloud that had passed the sun, so the gentle spring breeze that was blowing over the field felt more like a tundra gale. The last thing I needed was my baseball buddy turning my own snarkiness against me.
The game starts on time. Tomás Costa takes the hill for the Codgers, but after a first-pitch groundout, things go bad. Costa has to keep the ball down to be effective, and he hangs a curve to Knights catcher Chad Hull that Hull turns into a line drive single. An out later, Costa hangs another one, but this time he hangs it to a guy named Kirkland, and that’s generally a bad idea. The ball winds up in the right field seats, and Tempe leads 2-0.
Barney Sharp takes the mound for Tempe. He’s a crafty lefty who won 17 games for the Knights last year, and the first three Codgers make him look like his name. Mark Lamb strikes out swinging, and Mario Salinas and Ollie Morris ground out to complete a 12-pitch inning.
The Codgers fight back, though, as José Morán homers in the third. The get another in the 5th when Joe Parks singles, Javier Prieto doubles him to third and Brandon Collins gets enough of a 1-1 pitch to dribble it to the right side and score Parks. Sharp is a pro, though. He Ks Morán and gets Lamb to pop up to get out of the inning.
Costa has it going on, I’ve got to say that about him. He’s hard to hit most of the night, but he keeps making one mistake too many, and to the wrong hitters. Kirkland parks his second of the game in the 6th, pleasing Don-o to no end, and Miguel Soto makes it 4-2 Tempe in the 7th with another.
This Palm Springs gang, though, it don’t give up none. They tie it again after the 7th inning stretch. Parks draws a 4-pitch walk, and Prieto concludes an 11-pitch appearance by absolutely crushing a liner off the wall in center. Ronnie Ray‘s sac fly chases Sharp in favor of reliever Ángel López, who manages to get out of the inning only because Kirkland makes a prodigious throw to the plate to gun down the go-ahead run. It’s truly a remarkable throw, but Don-o picks up that Kirkland came off the field rubbing his fingers. He was replaced for the rest of the game.
Dan-o punches up info on Kirkland and asks me the trivia question of the day: “How the hell was Jason Kirkland a waiver wire pickup?”
“You shoulda known that, man,” I reply. “He goes to the AA All-Star game and the team puts him on waivers.”
“I want some of what that GM was drinking.”
The Tempe eighth starts, and we get to see another manager fall into a trap that I just can’t freakin’ understand. Palm Springs stays with Costa, and Larry Cox leads off with a base on balls. He steals second after Hull flies out, and what does Suzuki do? He walks Orlando García intentionally. This burns my buns and doesn’t do much for Don-o’s demeanor, neither. “Asinine,” he says, drinking his beer down in a single gulp and crushing the cup.
Chris Gamble follows with a single that’s too shallow to score the run, but it loads up the bases. Costa gets Adrián Romero to strike out, which could have ended the inning if the walk had turned into an out. Suzuki then calls reliever Kent Murphy into the game, and Murphy proceeds to go to a full count before walking in the lead run.
This, it turns out, is the ball game. Tempe tacks on three more in the 9th, but pretty much everyone in the park knows the game was over after the IBB.
“I make a vow here and now,” I tell Don-o. “If I ever manage a baseball team and a pitcher walks a guy like that intentionally, I’ll fire his backside so fast his head’ll fall off.
#
We find a hotel that’s really a crappy dive full of immigrants and guys just a step ahead of homelessness, but it’s next to a rocked-out bar and the price is hard to turn down. As we dump our stuff, Don-o notes that we’re got a river behind us. Actually, it’s just a creek, barely big enough to notice, but the water looks like it moved along pretty fast. Don-o stares at it for a good long time.
“Come on,” I say, “I’m getting hungry.” He doesn’t move until I grab his arm, which actually makes him jump.
“What the hell are you doing?” he asks.
I roll my eyes. He’s like that, always has been. “Your laser beams came out again,” I say, using code we’ve had since we were freshmen in high school, when he had nearly started holes in little Bethie Anderson. Generally, I find it kinda funny, but right now I was hungry and ready to go.
We head straight to the bar, where we get bar-b-que of reasonable merit and about a keg of beer. They have girls who dance but don’t take nothing off, and they have a band that comes in at 8:00 that gets better and better as the night and the beer flows. I remember playing a dice game and winning a little. I meet a dude who says he’s an advance scout for Kalamazoo, who is due in town sometime next week. I remember asking him about Ernesto Álvarez. He said the dude was everything he was rumored to be, that the problem is that the organization is just a little too deep in the outfield, and that maybe a deal is imminent.
I remember feeling damned important. “Maybe a deal is imminent.” I kept thinking that as the band played and while I was dancing with this chick who was wearing a tight Codgers t-shirt tied over on one side to show off her not-too-bad navel. “Maybe a deal was imminent.” A deal. Maybe. Imminent. I knew something that almost no one else knew. Certainly not the average fan. Not even those close in. A deal might be imminent and Ernesto Álvarez might be moving. I remember wondering if Álvarez knew what I knew.
Sometime in there, I know Don-o got hooked up with a guy who gave him a line, and he got that look. Crap. Don-o had done coke only twice before to the best of my knowledge, and neither one turned out particularly well.
I grab him and pull him out the door. It’s really late. Maybe two in the morning, maybe not. All I can say is that it’s late enough that the streets are mostly quiet. I want to go back to the room, but Don-o’s not having anything of it. He wants to get more beer and hang out. I look into his eyes and I can tell we’re not going to sleep anytime soon, so I take him to a liquor store and we get a pair of Bud sixes in cans that the dude only agrees to give us when I tell him we’re not driving and I point to our hotel across the way. We stumble out.
“Let’s go to the Rio Grande,” Don-o says.
I eventually realize he means the creek behind the hotel. “Sure,” I say, figuring it’ll be a good place to let him run off his high. I don’t like Don-o when he’s amped. A flying Don-o is a cool Don-o. A Don-o on grass is a fine dude. A Don-o on cocaine is a hair-raising concept.
We go to the creek bed and sit down. I crack open beers.
Don-o tells me about this chick in the place with eyes like that star right there in the sky. He drinks his beer and looks at the rest. “They’re going to get warm,” he says. “It’s 45° out here,” I reply, but he’s worried and I see where it’s heading. “Just a minute,” he says. And like that, he’s gone, disappeared into the inky Palm Springs nighttime like a goddamned ghost.
I blink and I rub my eyes. I barely have time to worry before he’s back with a length of plastic rope, which he loops through the hoops that hold the beer together. He then drops the cans into the water and lets the rope play out.
“Where did you get that?” I ask.
“Lady had it around her garden.”
“You stole it?”
“Indefinitely borrowed.”
“Damnit.”
“What?”
“I hate that, Don-o. Stealing ain’t right.” It’s not. I’ll bum and I’ll do on little of my own, but I can’t see stealing from someone else, and right now, the beer and the night air quiet and the sight of Don-o with his sparkling eyes and flush face and beer rolling down the side of his lips makes me that much more upset.
“All this ‘carpe-freakin’-diem crap is wearing thin,” I say. “It’s getting annoying.”
“Annoying? Me? Annoying? Gimme me a break. You want to talk about annoying? How about you’re the one whining every day that you ain’t got no future, oh boo-hoo-hoo.”
“I don’t steal.”
“That rope was just keepin’ rabbits outta the garden. Consider it my part to save the bunnies if it makes you feel better.”
We sit in silence for what might have been a second or might have been an hour. I finish my beer and don’t feel much like another. Finally, Don-o speaks.
“Sorry, dude. I’ll take it back when we’re done.”
“It’s all right,” I say. But I decide right then and there that I’m not telling him about Ernesto Álvarez. I’m not telling him that a deal might be imminent.