The Bullpen Gospels - Dirk Hayhurst [77]
With no promise of perky female nudity, or at least some mindless explosions, none of us had the desire to trade sleep for its viewing. Several of the players’ heads drooped, succumbing to sleep. Headphones went in or over ears; pillows separated craniums from glass-panel bus windows. Things were quiet, peaceful, stinky.
Twenty minutes could not have gone by before the bus came to a complete stop. Instinctively, all players woke up, operating under the assumption we had come to either a rest area or the new town’s hotel. The streaking sounds of horns blaring in our freshly woken ears as cars blew past the bus told us something was amiss. No signs or lights marked the outside areas. We were stopped in the middle of the highway.
At the helm of the bus, the cross-eyed bus driver was whimpering to our trainer. The manager’s voice chimed in and then the radioman. I couldn’t make out what was going on, but news soon trickled back as the grapevine of players passed it along, bus seat to bus seat.
“We’re lost,” came the headlines.
“What? How? It’s this guy’s job to know where we’re going.”
“Have you seen his eyes? I’m surprised we made it this far.”
“Easy, it could happen to anyone; cut him some slack,” I said, trying to act mature.
“Oh yeah, how many times have you been lost on a bus trip before?
“Maybe we just missed our off-ramp. Do we know how far lost we are?”
The question went down the vine, and soon the answer was brought back. Each time this answer traded mouth to ear, it left the person who heard it angry. Finally, it made it back to me.
“We are like an hour and a half in the wrong direction.”
“WHAT! That stupid son of a bitch! It’s his job to know where we’re going!”
The bus’s engine turned over and we started going again, though no one knew where. Information circulated. Ideas were generated. Road times calculated. The bus got off the highway at an exit near a hotel. We hoped we might stop and figure things out in the morning instead of spending all night on the bus. Fingers were crossed, breath was held, and souls were inevitably crushed as the bus sped past the possibility of a comfortable bed and back onto the highway.
Anger, magnified by lack of sleep and the promise of three extra hours on a vehicle that smelled like a horse stall, made sleep-deprived personalities volatile. At the rate we were going, we wouldn’t make it to Modesto until 7 A.M.
Meanwhile, Midnight Express chugged along on the screens above us, with footage of men scrambling about a Turkish prison. We had missed most of the plot and had no idea why they were imprisoned to begin with. We watched anyway, like zombies with no will to live and too irritated to slumber.
No one spoke. The wrong words would set off this powder keg of bush leaguers. As far as we were concerned, this bus was our Turkish prison, purgatory with coach seating. Our last glimmer of hope rested with this grainy, seventies flick. It was now this movie’s responsibility to enrapture us and distract our tortured souls from our present dilemma.
Then as if there was no doubt we might be on the midnight express to hell, the movie ambushed us with a shower scene portraying two male prisoners bathing each other, followed by a passionate make-out session. Time and space stood still as the images washed over us. Then, the spark hit powder and a scream split the night, “WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE WATCHING?”
Chaos ensued. Bottles were thrown at the television screens. Shouts of anarchy, outrage, and frustration mixed with swear words.
“Who picked this fucking movie?”
“Why does it smell so fucking bad in here?”
“Whose fucking hand is on my thigh?”
Oddly, all I could think about was the conversation I missed in the pen, the one about which guy on the team you’d have intercourse with if abducted by terrorists.
The bus came to another stop. The prisoners continued to bathe. You could hear frustrated conversation at the bus’s helm and see sexual frustration on the screen above. The radioman was obviously pissed off now, and