Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [43]
For those Westerners who have never seen the vehicle, a Lada is a midsized compact roughly the size of a Volkswagen Jetta, only perfectly square. Soviet designers chose that shape for its practicality. Once the car’s forward gears burned out— something that routinely occurs in many Russian-made vehicles within a month of purchase—the owner could simply turn around the seats and drive in reverse. No one would notice the difference.
Yuri’s Lada showed some mileage on it. Springs had pushed through the backseat cushion. Baling wire held the rear bumper in place. He had to arm-wrestle his balky stick shift whenever he changed gears, an isometric exercise that gave him a right forearm nearly twice as large as his left. His car did not appear to conform to any known safety standards, but we had no time to wait for something better. Those guards were almost on top of us and we were standing downwind.
Jay and I climbed into the backseat and asked Yuri if he knew of any pool halls nearby. “Oh, yes,” he replied, “Great. Pool. Know just the place. Beautiful. You will love. Guaranteed.” He passed over a bottle of Russian cognac he had hidden under his seat. “Only the best, straight from a vineyard in the Ukraine,” he assured us.
You know that book, Wine for Dummies? The authors wrote that for me. I have never claimed to be a connoisseur of anything. When Tom Seaver and I played for USC, people said that if you looked at Tom, you could tell he was destined for a long life of vintage brandy, expensive cigars, and stretch limousines. On the other hand, if you looked at me, you saw a future of filterless Camels, six-packs, and canoes. And clearly one day I would smoke too many cigarettes, drink all those six-packs, fall out of that canoe, and drown.
Yet even I knew that true cognac comes only from France. The concoction Yuri served tasted of boiled muscatel and turpentine distilled in a sugary syrup. Even so, it sure packed a wallop. Two sips and my brain melted down into a runny yolk sliding from my ears. My tongue blistered, and I could feel the enamel peeling from my teeth.
It took all of my willpower to maintain equilibrium. Yuri drove with the same regard for personal safety that Mad Max on a bender might exhibit. Did his car have brakes? Perhaps but he sure used them sparingly. Whenever we approached a red light, Yuri decelerated to a crawl, then floored it just as the light turned green. If he timed the signal wrong, he simply spun around the corner whether we needed to or not.
Our cab careened through city streets, swerving from one curb to another. I expected a traffic cop to pull him over. Drivers seldom sped in this town. Only commissars or gangsters owned the few Russian vehicles that could exceed fifty miles an hour. Moscow police did not even need radar to keep tabs on most drivers. They could have assigned a squad of elderly women in babushkas to sit on street corners and clock the cars with sundials.
Somehow Yuri managed to keep the pedal to the metal without attracting the police. He drove us to a bleak neighborhood of shuttered factories and warehouses just outside the center of Moscow. Our cab swooped under an elevated train station and barreled up a dead-end street.
The pool hall stood in the middle of the block, a white brick warehouse with a corrugated aluminum pull-down door. Yuri never exactly stopped in front of it. Instead, the car crept along while we slithered out from the backseat. He nodded toward a side entrance halfway up a dimly lit alley littered with broken beer bottles. We could hear rock music blaring from inside. “That’s where you go,” he called out “Very tip-top. You will see.”
Soon as our feet struck pavement, Yuri shifted into overdrive. His tires squealed, his muffler belched. He rode off swilling that