(Not That You Asked) (39 page)
Read (Not That You Asked) Online
Authors: Steve Almond
Tags: #Humor, #Form, #Essays, #Anecdotes & Quotations, #General
8. Ten years ago, when I was applying to grad school, I very nearly decided to attend the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, because I became hopelessly enamored with the idea of driving from my home in Miami Beach to Fairbanks, the northernmost hub of America if you don’t count Barrow, which (my apologies to the brave residents of that city) I don’t. The route ran 5,021 miles. It was a great plan, very cinematic, its central flaw being that it would oblige me to actually
live
in Fairbanks, which is a hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle and dark up to eighteen hours a day and where—according to a newspaper clipping sent to me by the Chief Curator at the inception of the plan—perfectly innocent citizens are occasionally killed by moose.
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1. Campy remains my favorite baseball player of all time. A few inches shy of six feet and 160 pounds, he was a shortstop by trade, though he is the only player in the history of the game to have played all nine positions in a single game,
including pitcher.
He did this at the behest of the team’s cockamamie owner, Charles Finley, who was crazier than any other man alive on the earth at that time.
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2. It should also be mentioned (though not dwelled upon) that I slept with a miniature kelly green bat under my pillow through my early childhood.
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3. Murphy is to be forgiven, at least by me, for helping to fund and produce MC Hammer’s first album.
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4. Or, as my colleagues referred to her,
Billie Jean Rug Muncher.
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Canseco: “What the fuck are
you
?”
Canseco: “Get the fuck out of my way.”
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6. The current figure is closer to 137,000, as Gibson’s homer has become inarguably the most popular highlight in the history of baseball. It is clearly a sickness that I cannot stop myself from watching these replays, and in particular that each time I see the play, some small, pathetic cavern of my heart truly believes it will turn out differently, that Gibson will swing through Eck’s lousy slider or send a harmless pop-up into shallow right.
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7. Anyone who knows the history of the Warriors—a franchise that had not, until this season, smelled the playoffs since the early Clinton years—will confirm the idiocy of my conduct. Rooting for the Warriors is like dating a Mormon with bad breath.
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Yes, I’m aware that was a political rant; that’s why I snuck it into a footnote.
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9. The key single supplied by Erubial Durazo, whose mellifluous name I sang in my head for the next thirteen hours.
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10. Varitek is often referred to as “the heart of the Red Sox.” I think of him, however, as “the thigh of the Red Sox,” owing to the Hendersonian dimensions of his quadriceps. In moments of morbid speculation, I have wondered whether these thighs are larger than my own torso. Those who detect an immature ad hominem in the foregoing observation, please note that Varitek’s physical deformity plays a central role in the drama about to unfold.
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11. I realize you expect me to launch a diatribe here about how modern sports culture—with its implicit reliance on aggression to generate unholy profits—marks a precise repudiation of the moral code Jesus expressed in the Beatitudes and, in this sense, a vital adjunct to the perversion of His message being carried out by the medieval bigots who populate the Christian Right of this country, but I’m not. So there.
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12. It would emerge that Hudson had sustained the injury the night before the game, during an altercation at a bar where he and another player had gone to unwind, apparently unaware that opposing players who enter Red Sox Nation surrender their civil right not to be hassled by shitfaced asshole fans.
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14. It struck me as plausible that his feeble swing in the fourth was in fact a setup, a point Young Bull and I argued to the point of causing Tim to place his head on the bar and attempt to sleep.
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15. This is what we in the lit game call
hyperbole,
for Bush/Cheney were—even as the series was being played—rapaciously ruining democracy as we know it, whereas the Sox/Yanks were merely ruining a week of my otherwise frittered leisure time. Still, I trust that A’s fans will understand what I mean.
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16. I say none of this in an effort to whitewash the future of our nation. Our obsession with sport is clearly a symptom of imperial doom. We must remember: All that held Rome together at the end was spectacle.
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1. Last winter Sarvas sold his first novel. Mazel tov,
mon blogamour!
Here’s to the hope you take up fiction…full-time.
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1. Who can blame her? One minute you’re a fish, happily afloat in a warm dark sea, the next you’re a shivering mammal, shoved into the bright cold beyond. Is it any wonder the Bible is so much about exile?
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2. Point of clarification:
I
press the Help button every seventeen minutes.
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3. My score on the 1984 Advanced Placement Physics Test (on a scale of 1 to 5): 1.
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4. No it doesn’t.
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5. At home, my wife will express awed disgust at the extent of my thievery. She will, for instance, remove a small pink plastic dish from my haul and hold it up for my consideration. “Did we really need a bedpan?”
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6. A loaner necessitated by the fact that Erin refused to see the sense in storing the child—at least for the first month or two—in one of the sturdy plastic bins that I occasionally remove from beneath public mailboxes, a bin that, as I’ve pointed out to her repeatedly, could easily be scrubbed and filled with clean blankets.
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Me: I’m telling you, this kid is a powerhouse. Two feet she shat!
Erin: All the way to the laundry bag!
Me: That’s
over
the lip of the changing table.
Erin: So, when do you want to come see her?
Friend: [More silence]
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1. My parents—who read this essay for factual content and have reserved the right to take legal action—would like it noted that we never actually ate ham
during
Chanukah.
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2. For those of you keeping score, that’s one great-grandfather for God, one against, and no (thank God) they were never in the same room.
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3. As for Almond—a name that doesn’t exactly scream Jewish—it was a naked bid at assimilation on the part of rabbi David after his emigration to London. Our name had been Pruzhinski.
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You’re welcome.
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5. I did briefly consider moving to Israel, but I’m afraid that had more to do with the native female population, lady soldiers with big hips and thick hair and rifles. Yum.
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6. As a good Catholic girl, she had a crucifix on her bedroom wall. “Not just the cross,” she notes. “The body was on it, too.” This, I believe, helps explain her attraction to me: She grew up worshipping a half-naked Jewish man.
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