The Bullpen Gospels - Dirk Hayhurst [53]
“Dude, I can totally relate to that.”
“Yeah, well, I’m a little angry and I’m a little sad, but mostly I just feel lost.”
“Yeah. Lost. Like you woke up naked and there was a camera and you don’t know how you got there.”
“Um…not like that, exactly.”
“My bad, dude, my bad, I’m drunk.” He made a motion as if he were zipping his lips.
“It’s okay. It’s just,”—I took another long look out the window—“I’ve been telling myself for the longest time this game had answers. It was going to give me worth as a person. That a jersey would make me somebody. I was going to make something of myself in this sport, and everyone would treat me like a superstar.” Tiny exaggeratedly bobbed his head up and down as I spoke. “I can’t even make it out of A-ball!” I tossed my hands up and let them fall.
“I guess it’s my own fault. I believed it all. I believed that if I won enough, I would be changed into something larger than life. Like I could fix the bad things in my life if I was super successful. I could fix the way I looked at myself. I could fix my family. I could fix everything. But baseball results don’t fix anything….”
“You know what I think,” I declared, “I think if we spend years of our lives playing this game and the only thing we have to show for it when we are done is a beat-up jersey and a string of numbers next to our name, then it was a hell of a waste of time. There has got to be more to this than just living and dying for the opportunity to wear the uniform. If that’s all there is, then, I hate to say it, but professional baseball is a waste.
“You know, the best part of my baseball career didn’t even have anything to do with baseball. I met a homeless guy in a shelter this off-season and gave him the shoes off my feet. He almost wept, dude, wept over a pair of shoes. I didn’t have to be a superstar to do that; I just had to be me. In fact, I tried to be a superstar first, and it was as if I just separated us further. I’ve never seen a person react that way to anything I’ve ever done in baseball. God, it just makes me wonder if I’m going about this right….”
Tiny looked at me real hard, it seemed as if the conversation sobered him. His eyes looked down and then back up to me, a deep thought forming on his brow, “Do you think I should get her some shoes, bro?”
I stared at him for a second or two. “Yes Tiny, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”
Chapter Seventeen
We spent the next few nights at the Lake Elsinore Hotel and Casino, ironically, only an hour north of San Diego itself. Casinos are one of those things that have flashy, movie-quality associations attached to them. When your brain hears the word, it gets giddy, and the mind’s eye conjures forth a movie reel of flashy lights and showgirls. The Lake Elsinore Hotel and Casino is pretty much the opposite of that fanciful imagery in just about every way.
It’s as if someone took a truck stop, a bad truck stop, with mysterious stains on the bathroom floors, racks of sticky-paged magazines, and shady travelers, then bred that scene with a dilapidated bingo hall. The place is full of sun-dried mummies wearing BluBlockers and Hawaiian print shirts. They fight with comic convention fan boys toting fanny packs and shifty Asian tourists for table minimums, propelled by a never-ending stream of mentholated cigarettes and white Russians.
In the hotel and casino, there’s a bar the baseball community refers to as the Star Wars Cantina. It was christened such because you never know what kind of alien life you’ll discover within it—women with sagging, pruny faces balanced by plastic, buoyant chests who will do things for poker chips that would make a sailor blush; broken-down old men who have drunk themselves out-of-bounds of space and time; and with every Lake Elsinore home series, the visiting baseball club.
The Lake Elsinore Hotel and Casino is the Lake Elsinore Storm’s official hotel, as well as the official accommodations of the visiting team. It leaves its stink in the clothes of many a Cal League player. I’ve stayed in it my fair share of nights, and I know how bad it