This Round's on Me

“Good morning son.
Twenty years from now
Maybe we’ll both sit down
And have a few beers.”

For certain demographics, the 20th of April is synonymous with indulgence in a certain mind and mood altering vice. The day's festivities typically kick off with piling into a friend’s tight, rust bucket car or poster and tapestry-clad basement, covering every square inch in a thick haze of marijuana smoke. While one auditions crudely formed jokes, another feels compelled to share with his friends his new-found interpretation on life, beginning, of course, with his handWhile impossibly relaxed, they harbor the thrill of breaking an "oppressive, closed-minded" law at the same time, as well as the worldliness of knowing exactly which code it is. Productive and eye-opening as that sounds, With no bad habits to support, contacts to provide them, and the day off from work I spent the night uneventfully at home. No, I remind myself, this time of year holds other, more austere observances for me. On the evening of the 21st, I decided I needed a drink

I left the car along Tower Parkway downtown and hoofed it to Chapel Street and Richter’s, a bar I’d passed dozens of times before and had been meaning to try for months. Though the outer facade grants the place the appearance of an old man’s watering hole, it is always teaming with pods of Yaleans and other species of regular, all drinking and laughing and enjoying themselves—something I could just never do solo while others around me did it socially.

It was a Tuesday, by no means a ‘big’ night for hitting the town, but then, by no means do you really need an excuse when the weather was this inviting and if you’re a Yale student so close to finals time. It was early yet and the doors were open. I pushed forward.

Various of Yale's college insignias hung on the wall next to a mounted stag’s head. Scattered factions of diners and only a few bar patrons. A middle-aged man hitting on a moderately attractive bar-made. A Michael McDonald body-double hitting on a young, ‘full-figured’ black woman; two male students, sans the flirtation, looking on from behind their beers in amusement; a good selection of beer; someone having not a pint, half-liter, or liter, but a YARD poured for them…A solo excursion under these conditions was, I decided, not pathetic, but essential.

I bought a Bohemian style lager I hadn’t seen on tap anywhere since my time abroad and sat sipping it and watching a baseball game on one of the bar’s three televisions. I took a long draught from my pint glass. Through the hopsy golden fog of it Roy Halladay gets a sign he likes. He winds up, all six and a half lanky feet of him, lunges off the mound and the baseball leaves his hands…

--Why don’t they use metal bats, like my friends and I do?
--Because that would be too easy.
--My friend says metal bats are better.
--Not really.
--But wouldn’t they hit more home-runs?
--Don’t they hit enough already?
--I guess…
--How many did Babe Ruth hit?
--Ummm..(a brief pause) Seven-hundred-and-fourteen
--(a laugh) That’s right, and he swung a wooden bat, didn’t he, Jake?
--Yeah. (a coy smile at ‘Jake’)
--(leaning in close) So you tell your friend that wood bats work just fine, eh?

My nostrils flare and my upper lip curls…

…On the stools to my left, a young couple sit nursing a pair of whiskies. I shudder, but who walks into a bar with an aversion to whiskey and has the audacity to complain about it? I pretend that a stool a few seats down provides just the angle that has eluded me for watching this game. Doting on each others every word they fail to notice my switch. Turning my attention back to the game I can still smell it. I think of my father, dead five years as of the previous day

As a boy, when he would bring me close, be it for the greeting lift-off, the kiss goodbye, or some lesson of unfathomable importance to my ensuing manhood, his breath was an invisible right that could just about knock me out of my Velcro Nikes.

Eventually I’d drawn the correlation between the distillery fumes emanating from his mouth and the brown paper bag I saw in the cup-holder of his car on weekends when he came by to pick us up, or at any other point in the day.

I give him credit; he was good at trying to hide it, waiting until our attentions spanned elsewhere long enough to drain a few more milliliters of sadomasochism from his crude paper-bag dram. But it’s impossible to hide anything from a kid forever. They always find it, whatever it is. They always ask questions. What harm can questions really cause when you’re a kid? The thought orbited my six, then seven, then eight year old mind, but apart from one bad-breath accusation, I could just never bring it up.

I had to learn to take the good with the bad. With so little good to go around, I had to cherish it, really crystallize it all, the good, the bad and otherwise, all streamlined like movements in your very own waltz. I think it was Theodore Roethke who reminded that such dances are difficult to keep up.

The man loved baseball, and as I am told was a prolific little league coach, guiding his kids to several pee-wee championships. Of course, only those who truly contributed to that two-foot trophy were honored in the end. What does that mean exactly? Just imagine if coach Buttermaker didn’t include tragic Timmy Lupis when he doled the individual “good job” trophies out to the rest of the ‘Bad-News’ Bears. Due to his fervor and high on base percentage, I imagine the kid instructed to lean into just about every fastball got his, even if he made more contact with his bruised radial ulna than a baseball bat. It’s impossible to tout his little-league golden years without bringing him right back down and chaining him to the earth with that bit of local sports trivia.

I had always imagined that one day, when I deemed myself presentable and when everything from the past had settled (the way grass grows again slowly over the carnage of a battlefield), I would contact him, and maybe start the process of catching up. He wasn’t fit to drive so, I imagined myself with a driver’s license and enough geographical wherewithal to tackle the George Washington Bridge and navigate the Bronx for a Yankee game. Along the way I listen to his dogmatic baseball opinions, and allow him, one half out of empathy and the other sheer entertainment value, to continue believing he knew everything. When we arrive at the big ballpark in the Bronx, when we walk past anything enshrined to Yogi Berra, he reiterates to me and anyone else listening how much of damn stupid wop he thought the accidental sage really was.

Elston Howard! Now that’s who I grew up with; now THAT was a catcher…

Counter-intuitive as it is to offer a (hypothetically) recovering alcoholic a beer, in my vision we have enough time before the first pitch to duck into one of the bars that dot the stadium's interior, or share a few overpriced stadium Budweisers when we reach our seats.

It never happened, of course.

Parallel parking is in itself a special order for me, and I am not the navigator to see your way through any kind of jungle, concrete or otherwise. He called a few times intermittently over the years, mostly out of guilt I suspect; he desperately tried to leap-frog from casual small talk into something, anything meaningful while avoiding the past, nearly drowning at times in dead air as he cast out life-lines guessing at the person he thought his 17-year old son might be. Mercifully, I brought up baseball…

Each year around this time it floods my mind like heavy stout into a clear pint glass.

A few years back, my college roommates and I were on our way back to the dorms after an excursion to the liquor store. The only of us over twenty-one at the time, it was on me to actually walk into the place, handle the money and buy everything.

With a case of beer in each hand, my Sam’s Summer Ale in the left and someone’s cheap piss-water in my right, I make my way from the car to our door, ever vigilant for campus cops. It’s sunny and breezy; all the apartment windows are open, each one blaring at differing volumes the dull roar of a crowd; the pop of fast-ball meeting catcher’s mitt; lyrical triteness of Neil Diamond; Jerry Remy’s incoherent banter; all the magical numbers in the original soundtrack of Fenway Park. In Springfield, Mass, you couldn’t sell your first born to watch a damn Yankee game…

Without pretext, one of the usually sturdy handles suddenly breaks and it falls to the dirt in a heavy thud.

Shit...

I lift the case of Sam’s up off the ground. As if pulled from an invisible spigot by a phantom barman, a perfect amber-gold stream pours out the bottom. I watch it foam and fizz and quickly dissolve into the earth. Once inside I open the case and inspect it: Completely dry. ONE bottle of twenty-four directly in the center, a perfect crack around its base and not a drop of beer left inside. I pop the cap of my own beer on the edge of the counter and raise it to my lips. From our doorway I peer across the way through our neighbor’s window and the game playing on the television.