Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [44]
A sinewy bouncer with the lantern jaw and rampant facial acne that said steroid abuser ushered Jay and me inside. The pool hall was a recently converted garage with a high ceiling and a naked concrete floor. It had an industrial smell, the odor of motor oil and antifreeze. Low-hanging domes of bad fluorescent lighting illuminated eight tattered pool tables. Young Russian men and women crowded the place, many of them dressed in second-rate knockoffs of American designer jeans and T-shirts.
We bought a pitcher of beer for twenty cents to wash out the foul flavor of Yuri’s cognac. No improvement. That Russian brew tasted yeasty, warm, and flat. Rather than stay at the bar, Jay and I walked over to a pool table for a little kibitzing.
We immediately noticed that all the balls rolling across the green felt surface were white. These kids played each other with nothing but cue balls. During the game we watched, a young man hit one white ball to sink another. When they both dropped into the pocket, he bunny-hopped around the room to high-five all his friends.
In America and the rest of the planet, that double dunk counted as a double scratch. You deducted both balls from your score and forfeited your turn. In Moscow it passed as a trick shot worth extra points. Watching the shooter and his mates celebrate brought to mind all those Russian base runners I had picked off over the previous few days. “Well,” I said to Jay, “here’s another sport they haven’t quite got the hang of yet.”
When someone identified us as Americans to our bartender, the celebration started. Drinks were on the house. Two men invited me into a back room where a group of Russian university students were rolling hashish. Not Jay’s scene at all; he stayed at the bar. I smoked several bowls while listening to a local punk rock band’s bootlegged cassette, music that the government prohibited. It is difficult to describe the singer’s high, slurring, ragged voice. Imagine listening to Jiminy Cricket with his larynx trapped in a high-speed blender. The music behind him played slow but hard-pushing, a funeral march set to rock rhythms. I was thoroughly into it.
Perhaps it was that hash we smoked. As the music grew louder, the floor undulated beneath us. My pupils enlarged so wide, the fluorescent light became a cool, liquid sun pouring past my eyelids. Suddenly we stood inside the Tower of Babel. Everyone in the crowd seemed to be chattering at each other in some foreign language. I wanted to scream in panic. Then I remembered: this was Moscow, not Hoboken. They were speaking in a foreign language.
My mind got further blown when a woman I danced with introduced me to two brothers. Not only were they identical twins dressed in identical suits, their parents had named them Sergei and Sergei. This is not something you want to hear while tripping your face off on ersatz cognac, hashish, vodka, and beer and the hazy world already resembles the set of a David Lynch film. The brothers worked as black marketers who traded in caviar, bonded scotch, Genoa salami, Cuban cigars, and marijuana. They suggested we jump into their car and continue our party at a nearby disco.
Whichever one of the twins sat at the wheel must have been shitfaced. He could not drive a straight line. The car weaved through traffic and nearly sideswiped several vehicles. Before long, Soviet police cars surrounded us. An officer gave our driver a Breathalyzer test and detained us on a DWI.
We did not reach the disco parking lot until two hundred rubles later. My leg muscles had cramped. Manufacturers did not build the Lada for anyone much over six feet tall. I was in such a hurry to get the blood rushing back into my limbs, I opened the car door without looking and banged into a black van parked alongside us. A van owned by a Russian plain-clothes policeman. The officer jumped out of the vehicle screaming and flashing his badge.
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