One Night in Chagrin
written by: Simon Nadel
The biggest guy in the bar wanted to fight me. It was the same wherever we went. That night we were in Chagrin, a small city in the western part of the state. There were more than a few Confederate flags and graffitied swastikas, and nearly every pickup had a gun rack. I think we passed an Applebee’s or maybe it was an Olive Garden. It was only May, but the temperatures were already reaching into the upper 90s. Weiss said, We’re living in a dystopia and we don’t even realize it. None of us knew what the hell he was talking about.
We usually tried to defuse the situation. There was no upside to fighting the locals. Weiss was the best at it. He’d pretend to have some common interest with them, fishing or hunting or some other activity that involved killing animals. Weiss was the oldest guy on the team. He was really smart. He’d probably be a manager someday.
I didn’t usually say too much. If it was up to me I’d happily throw some punches. But we had a game the next day or the bus was leaving early in the morning. There was no time for brawling. Besides, I’d usually already ripped their hearts out. I was locked in that spring. That’s why they all wanted to fight me.
That night in Chagrin I probably should have just stayed in my motel room.
***
I’d faced this guy before. He wasn’t just a thrower, he knew the craft. He changed speeds, he stayed away from the heart of the plate, he lived on the corners. I laid off everything that was out of the strike zone and fouled off the pitches that caught the edges. I wore him down and he missed his target and grooved a fastball right down the middle. I’d been raking all season. I hit it 450 feet.
***
The bar had sawdust on the floor and free peanuts in the shell on each table. Kurchowy got the first round. Everybody was craning their necks to get a look at me. It was all men in the place. That’s never a good sign.
***
He wouldn’t make the same mistake in my second at-bat. He fed me nothing but breaking balls, none topping 80 miles an hour. Then he hung one and I deposited it over the leftfield wall, just inside the foul pole.
***
I spotted him pretty quickly. He was playing pool. He had on a flannel shirt and a red MAGA hat. He was a big boy, not quite as big as me but not too many regular humans are. He’d probably played high school football but he’d let himself go in that typical way and was hauling around a sizable beer belly. He was a cocky son-of-a-bitch, talking shit to his friends and looking in my direction.
***
Third at-bat, new pitcher. This guy was throwing gas, maximum effort. He definitely had Tommy John surgery in his future. He probably only had an inning in him. His control was lousy but the bases were loaded so he had nowhere to put me. He let the count get full and now he had to throw a strike. I mashed it and watched it fly over the wall in dead center.
***
Weiss got the second round and Florio got the third. One more for the road, I said to my teammates, and headed to the bar. The guy at the pool table glared at me then smashed the cue over his knee and threw the two splintered shards to the ground. Then he started walking towards me.
***
New pitcher. I knew what was coming. I’d seen the manager giving him instruction before he took the mound. I was going to wear one, I just didn’t know when, which pitch. It turned out it was the first one, but it was way too far inside and I was able to avoid it by leaning forward as it sailed past the back of my head to the backstop. He should have waited, kept me guessing. The ump warned him immediately. I dug in, knowing the next pitch would be outside. I sent it over the right field wall. I stayed at the plate and admired my handiwork. I flipped the bat in the air. I blew a kiss at the pitcher on my way around the bases. The crowd booed. My manager shook his head. He was old-school. When he called me into his office after the game I was sure I was gonna get chewed out. Instead he told me I was going to the Majors. Then he said what people had been telling me my whole life: You were made for the big stage. The lights won’t be too bright for you.
***
The bartender put four mugs in front of me. I turned to take them back to our table but the guy who’d been eyeballing me all night was standing in my way. He blew me a kiss. I was about to offer to buy him and his friends a beer. That’s what Weiss would have done.
Maybe it was the four-homer game. Maybe I was just tired of these rednecks getting in my face night after night. I balled up my fist and punched him square in the jaw. It felt even more satisfying than barreling up a fastball. The bar descended into chaos. I thought, this will make a hell of a story for my new teammates.
They took me to the hospital first. I spent a few days there, then I went to jail for the assault. But I wasn’t there that long.
It was my balance. That’s what I lost when my eardrum got shattered. That and a bunch of other stuff, stuff that allowed me to destroy baseballs and also function as a regular member of society. Someone had smashed a barstool into the side of my head, like you’d see in an old western. It turned out it was a good story, but by the time I remembered it I had no one to tell.
There was a boarding house around the corner from the motel. I got a small windowless room there; it was all I could afford. I couldn’t really go out or do much of anything during the daytime because the sunlight exacerbated my vertigo. So I got a job washing dishes at night at that bar with the sawdust on the floor and the free peanuts in the shell. No one recognized me. I’d put on some weight and I had a slow, shuffling gait. I wasn’t too good about keeping up with my hygiene. My speech was slurred and sometimes I was barely intelligible. The guys in the kitchen call me Retard, as in, Hey Retard, I need some clean glasses. It’s not that bad. We all joke around with each other, kind of like we used to in the dugout.
I mostly stay in my room during the day. In the rare moments when I’m able to sleep I never dream about baseball. Maybe my subconscious thinks I’ve suffered enough. I was right about Weiss, he did become a manager. His ballclub was in town the other night so I decided to go. It was a beautiful evening. I bought a hotdog and stumbled to my seat without dropping it or falling. A mother tried to shield her two small kids; an old guy turned away. I used to make opposing pitchers uncomfortable, now it’s young families and senior citizens and anyone else unfortunate enough to be in my immediate vicinity. Lucky for them the glare from the stadium lights was giving me a blinding headache so I had to leave midway through the first inning. I threw my uneaten hotdog in the trash on the way out.
- One Night in Chagrin - August 15, 2024
- The Neverending Adventures of Eleanor Dobbins - May 12, 2024
- Persistent Memories - December 31, 2023
