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The Season
That Almost Wasn’t By Tom Meek (2005) |
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For thirteen years I’ve been a Red Sox season ticket
holder, though last season, which began with tantrum, almost was the season
that wasn’t. It
was the third Sunday in March, and like every third Sunday in March we were
to gather at Jim’s apartment in the South End to divvy up the tickets. A
decade ago, when the South End was still gritty and Jim lived in a cluttered
split-level, this process had been easy. There were six of us, and four seats (Section 41, Row 17, Seats 20-23; perched atop
the upper lip of the concourse entrance, they were the best cheap buckets in
all of Fenway, a short hop to the beer stand and
nothing before you but a railing and more legroom than anywhere else in the
park except perhaps, the luxury skyboxes), but over the years, things
became complicated. Jim upgraded to a penthouse loft. His girlfriend’s father
moved to New Hampshire, bequeathing us (Jim, the pool) two pricey box seats,
and, as Jim’s entrepreneurial ventures started to take off, it was not
unlikely to find one or two new guys at Jim’s on that third Sunday in March.
They essentially amounted to generic, J. Crew goons with over starched
collars, who got in because they fed Jim’s bottom
line. I was never consulted about such additions and hated paying double for
two cramped slots under the batter’s net (and the rules of our draft deemed
you had to pick them) when I could be out in the spacious wilds of the
bleachers. By 2004 we had six seats, seventeen shares, a complicated draft
process, and rules, on top of rules, on top of rules. In short, the one-hour
booze fest had blown up into a three hour, consult my wife on the cell phone,
pissing contest. To
be fair, Jim was generous. He floated the green for the tickets and catered
the draft day festivities with a spread of fancy finger food and a chest full
of beer on ice. He even hosted a website that listed who picked what games so
we could easily swap within the group. Of course this was primarily
implemented to avoid the pratfall of scalping¡ªloss of
season tickets. We all had to vow to keep the tickets safe: if you couldn’t
trade or sell them within the group, you could sell them to family and
friends, but never above face value, and never on the street—or worse, eBay. Sometime
at the beginning of March 2004, I got the email informing me about the
logistics of the draft. I didn’t need to save it, or re-review it; it was
already committed to memory—the third Sunday in March at Things
did not go well that day. My karma was bankrupt. Bad luck might actually have
been preferable. The only glimmer of fortune was the short skirt Alison wore,
but in the end, that too only added insult to injury. The first martini when
down easy. We were still talking about running by the time the second round
came up. I couldn’t remember the names of the recent Kenyon or Ethiopian
winners and was already digging up Bill Rogers, Joan Benoit Samuelson and
John Kelly to keep the conversation aloft¡ªrealizing
that if you’re talking about running with a lovely lady and you’re not an
avid runner, you’re done for. “If you had children, would you raise them
religious?” Alison asked as I was extracting Amby Burfoot, Frank Shorter and Toshihiko Seko
from the recesses of my memory. The
question caught me. Not because it came out of left field, but because I was
an atheist and had no idea how I would negotiate it even if I were having a
life planning discussion with a woman I was considering marriage with—let
alone a fourth date. It did however lift the veil of my martini haze. My
response¡ªa feeble attempt to deflect and
redirect—was to ask what time it was. In my grand folly, I never wore a
watch, didn’t carry a PDA and my cell phone was always off. I possessed a
reliable sense of time and because I could just simply memorize addresses,
telephone numbers, times, dates, places and appointments, I didn’t need a
PDA, calendar or address book. It may sound a tad over-the-top, but it’s
true. The only problem was that when I drank, my facility went south. “Seven-oh-five,” Alison replied. Panic
hit. I jumped up, slapped down five tens and nearly lost my balance as I
leaned over the table to land a harried peck on Alison’s cheek. The wistful
smile and a glimpse of her high riding skirt gave cause for a third martini,
but the call of Pedro, Nomar and another agonizing
season was stronger. When
I got to Jim’s cavernous loft, it was just about over. Stabs of ¡°Where have
you been?¡± and ¡°Why don’t
you answer you cell phone?¡± echoed off the fifty foot high
ceilings. I
was in shock. “Don’t worry,” Jim said, “Scott did your
picks.” Scott
was Jim’s sister’s on-again, off-again boyfriend from “Did
I get any Yankees games?” I asked, hoping the answer would stem my mounting
rage. “Sorry
dude, you picked last.” “Last?
But I’ve got seniority.” Jim
cited the rules and informed me that I had to have put down a deposit or physically
be at the draft with check in hand to even get in the order, and that under
normal circumstances I should have forfeited my shares for the season, but
since I told him I was in and had been in for years, he had Scott do my
picks. “It’s
barely past seven,” I protested. “Draft’s
at five this year, it was in the email.” “What?” “People
had conflicts, so we started early.” “Who?” “Some
people have families and commitments. Five was better” I
was bullshit. Who were these guys? If the third Sunday in March gave
them scheduling fits, what would happen if a game went into extra innings?
Would they just scoot? I was damned if I was going to settle for Devil
Ray tickets while they got the money games against the hated Yankees.
Talking to Jim in an intentionally audible tone, I pointed around the room at
the those in pressed business shirts on a Sunday evening¡ªguys whose
names I didn’t know, or care to know¡ªand branded them fair-weather
posers, pencil-necked geeks, and fain¨¦ant shitheads. I prayed for one of them—anyone of them—to
take exception. My frustration needed a face. But none of them bit.
They just stood there blankly and unaffected as they always had¡ªwhich
pissed me off even more. I grabbed my bike helmet and told Jim I was out. Out
for the season, out of the pool and that he and his bottom feeding cronies
could have a jolly good time divvying up my Now
I’m not going to say that because I saved Jim’s ass in a bar fight and nearly
got strangled unconscious for it, or, when he was put on disciplinary
leave—under suspicion of using company resources for personal gain (running a
tourism business out of his office)—and I broke in (after much pleading from
the guilty) and alleviated the evidence against him, that he did me any
favors, but as I was on the way out the door, Jim thwarted me with a couple
of cold ones. On
the roof deck, in the graying darkness, we looked out at the lit columns that
were the Hancock and Prudential towers as Jim laid it on about sticking
together, the highs and lows of our fifteen years as friends (the vodka
fueled road trip to Buffalo, the con man who dated Jim’s sister and stole his
truck, the money made, the money lost, Jim taking hallucinogens for the first
time and going to a Dead show at the old Garden, a few weddings, a death, and
the women that came and went), the bond that persisted between us¡ªwith the
team—and how this would be the year. At first it sounded like
more noise, then the realization of what I had known all along sank in like
the cold March dankness: the responsibility for the debacle was mine, and
mine alone, and by trying to pin it on someone or something else, I had
turned a simple disagreement into a monstrous spectacle. Shame suffused me. I
suddenly felt I had betrayed Jim, and wanted to do something—anything—to
atone, but Jim, ever prideful of his integrity, and a man to back up his
words, beat me to the punch. In his outstretched hand were the four bleacher
seats to the season’s first conflict with the archrivals. The Yankee tickets
were mine, contingent that I took Jim as one of my guests. Jim even offered
to swap a night in the bleachers for box seats against the lowly Devil Rays.
It wasn’t a big gesture, but a gesture that spoke to the significance of the
years between us. “Lou Piniella’s down there,” he
said with a shrug that was supposed to convince me he was serious about the
matter and not doing me a favor, “so who knows?” But we all knew. The
rest is history. Nomar got shipped to *** Another
third Sunday in March has come and gone. This time I double checked the
logistics and offered to put down a deposit early, but Jim, citing that the
number of shares had dropped to twelve (two people moved away and another
said that they could now die happy and were done being a Sox fan), said that
since the group had been reduced to a manageable and trusted core, deposits
were not required. It was news to me, and I kindly informed Jim that this was
a rule change that he had failed to mention in the email or post on the
website. Alison
never followed up with her usually chatty email. A week later I tossed her a brusk one liner asking her how things were. Her reply was
perfunctory. She told me she was fine and thanked me for the martinis. Then
there was the PS telling me that I wasn’t the kind of person that she hoped I
might be, that I lacked family values and a devotion to God. I don’t know how
she arrived at such conclusions. I wanted to protest, but—to a degree—she was
right. I didn’t share her exact devotion, but I did have faith. |
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