Chapter Six: Take Me Out To The Bat

Erik called me the following week. He was the product of Joan’s matchmaking, and I had little choice but to take the call. In fact, we chatted a couple of times before arranging to meet, and it was a delight to check for a local number on the blinking message box for a change.

We arranged to go to a Yankees’ game, which seemed pretty innocuous. It had the security of a big crowd, along with the “at least we’ll have something to talk about” safety factor, and without the silence and knee touching that accompanies movie dates.

In the olden days in the late 1980’s, you could wander up to Yankee Stadium ten minutes before the game and get a pretty good seat. Hell, they were almost giving tickets away with every Big Mac (and large fries). Back then, you could say to your buddies, ‘Let’s meet at The Bat’ and all would be well.

I’m not even sure that The Bat has made it to the new, fancy stadium. I can only hope so, because it was a huge concrete phallus that thrusts up into the Bronx sky on the far side of the stadium from the subway. Before each game, it is littered with bodies strewn about its base, like so many crabs, if you take the analogy further. Which I just did.

Erik had been to games in more recent years, when post-season play seemed inevitable for the team I had watched lose week after week a dozen years before.

“Too many people at The Bat,” he assured me. “There’s this spot I always use: the pay phone just between The Bat and the ticket windows. Not the booths, mind: the windows.”

Meeting by a pay phone, I felt, was a recipe for disaster. Suppose there was a long line? How would I be able to spot my mystery man? As it transpired, a lot else had changed in over a decade, and everyone except me seems to have an umbilical cord tied to their cell phones. As I walked past The Bat on my way to the ticket windows (not the booths), I saw him.

Joan’s description, if you recall, had been “adorable, single, funny and rich.” Let’s take these adjectives in reverse order, shall we? I was in no position to judge the man’s personal wealth, and had not had time to ascertain the humor behind any anecdotes he might have saved up for this meeting, and he had no wedding ring or conspicuous tan line where one had been recently, but I found him less than adorable.

I took this to be a personal failing. What was wrong with me when a perfectly eligible man was not up to my standards? Me, who could give lessons to priests on celibacy. Me, whose last huge crush had swerved violently into a tempestuous love affair, the result of which had been a lost weekend of misery lasting the better part of four years.

We took our seats (box seats, if you must know, by first base) and we cut to the chase. Having already had the obligatory “how do you know Joan?” conversation, along with the equally compelling sibling and parental history, rants on just how much we thought our President was an imbecile, and who makes the best bagel (we both agreed Ess-a-Bagel, but only the original store on First and 21st), we were now faced with an awkward silence. How better to fill this void than with baseball talk?

I reminisced charmingly about the days of Mattingly, Espinoza and Mel Hall, and he told me about growing up watching Mickey Mantle. I recalled the time we were tied for first place with the Toronto Blue Jays, and the fans actually booed the Canadian national anthem, and he matched my story with the time he caught a piece of Paul O’Neill’s bat.

At last, we rose for the National Anthem. Now, I am a purist, and believe that the anthem should be sung without Whitney Houston-ish trills or Roseanne Barr-esque gestures. I was happy when some regular Joe shuffled up to the microphone and sang it straight. At least I think that was his intention. However, this is what came out over the public address system:

“Oh say can you see by the dawn’s early bright -”

Did he say “bright?”

“What so proudly we hail at the twilight’s last beaming.”

“Beaming”? Is this the Star Trek version? I suppressed a smirk.

“Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous flight
O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly seeming.”

They only appeared to be gallant? I stifled a giggle.

He was so confident in his endeavor, that I could only assume that I had misunderstood the words all the way through high school. Then came the clincher:

“And the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting right there”

I lost the battle against hysteria after “Babe Ruth through the night that our flag was still air”

I have to confess that I didn’t really take in much of the rest of his rendering. The last eight bars or so finds baseball aficionados restless for the words “Play Ball!” so thankfully a stirring of the crowd drowned the remainder out.

Erik glanced at me out of the corner of his face, his hat firmly grasped in his right hand over the general area of his left nipple. Maybe he had wax in his ears. Maybe the whole stadium did, but I was certain of what I had heard, and had not been under the influence of recreational drugs for almost fifteen years.

I must be getting better, I told myself, as I rode the subway home. It took until the fifth inning for me to be really certain that I would rather have watched the game alone with a Corona Light and a calzone.

The Yankees won, of course, and Derek Jeter made an astounding play, Bernie Williams hit a two-run homer, and Andy Pettite continued to look like a bewildered adolescent. Erik seemed happy, if not with me, then certainly with the game.

As I ran my bath that night, I knew I wouldn’t be pacing the floor waiting for the phone call that wouldn’t come.