Thursday, September 15, 2005
Hey! Summer break is over and Knuckleball is back! O.K., so I really didn't plan on a summer break. But when June 30th rolled around and I didn't have anything new to post it just kind of happened.
Kit Kiefer appears to have worked some this summer as the following story indicates.
Just remember: don’t mess with the loss of physics . . .
Sparky
What’s a Packer wife know about cooking, anyway?
Kit Kiefer
The talk at the coffee break was just talk, the way things go before someone grabs hold of a subject and drags everyone along, the way talk at coffee breaks go. There was what they did over the weekend, the weather, the lawn, the game, the other game, then that got JT talking about a Packer wife that visited Iola couple of days before.
She stopped by the Kwilting Klub where JT’s wife belongs. "Kwilting Klub" is their spelling, or the spelling the ladies of the club chose 50 years ago. Beats "Quilting Qlub," that’s about all JT has to say for it. The Packer wife’s married to Brady Boyer, the linebacker. Not much of a linebacker, really. Managed to stay on the roster for five years through laziness on the part of the front office getting anyone to replace him, but you stay on the Green Bay roster five years and have a chin that’s all right angles and next thing you know a Ford dealer in Pulaski has you doing ads, and pretty soon you’re a sort-of celebrity, a regular on all the Monday-night Packer shows live from the bowling alley in De Pere.
Brady Boyer’s wife was there at the Kwilting Klub meeting trying to sell them a Packer wives’ cookbook for their fundraising, which is a noble gesture on her part excepting that the Kwilting Klub doesn’t do fundraising. Mostly they buy little scraps of fabric, and a couple of weekends rummage-saleing at the start of the summer gets them all the scraps of fabric they can handle. It doesn’t much seem right to hold a fundraiser, making the community buy cookbooks so the Kwilting Klub can go to rummage sales and buy little kids’ rompers. Brady Boyer’s wife was telling them they could sell the cookbooks and give the money to charity, but too many Norwegian ladies in the crowd started wondering why you’d want to do that, why you’d want to have a Kwilting Klub buy cookbooks to sell cookbooks to make money to give to some other charity or maybe the church so they could help people around Iola that need helping. Easier to just cook Odd Evenson a couple meals of tuna casserole and be done with it.
“You think about it, what’s a Packer wife know about cooking, anyway, enough to write a cookbook about it?” JT says. “First off, she’s got a husband making six hundred thousand dollars a year, and second, she’s living in Green Bay. If she doesn’t hire someone to do the cooking she’s making enough where she can carry out at Kroll’s every day of her life and still have plenty over to buy an SUV for the cat. Think she’s going to spend all day inventing cost-conscious and tasty yet nutritious meals for her and the man of the house? Hell, no.
“Second, even if she does do the cooking she’s not cooking for normal human beings, which is what Packers aren’t. None of them are exactly shaped like you or me.”
“Good thing, too,” says Homer, having a look at JT’s belly, which hadn’t got smaller over break.
“Yeah, I saw that coming,” JT says back. “They’re not shaped like you or me. They’re not. They’re either six-eight and three-fifty or five-eight and one-seventy-five or one percent body fat drinking protein-powder milkshakes four times a day. They either eat 14 steaks smothered in pork chops or nothing you don’t scoop out of a can, or nothing at all so they make weight. You gonna make a cookbook out of that?”
JT opens the cookbook right about then and pretends to read. ‘Glass of water. Take one eight-ounce glass. Fill with water from tap or bottle. Sip or gulp. Serves one to 75,328.’
“’Lead-wrapped filet. Take one eight-ounce filet mignon and wrap with neatly split and cleaned lead pipe salvaged from construction site. Broil until lead melts, about six minutes a side.
“‘Favorite family heirloom recipe for yogurt-whey smoothie,’ my eye. Maybe you want to be married to a Packer, hitch your wagon to a star and all that, but I can’t see where you’d want to cook for one, and then feel comfortable sharing your recipes with the world.’
“I dunno, JT,” Homer says. “I mean, I’ve read some of those cookbooks, read them as much as I’d read any cookbook, and sometimes you get some real good recipes – good recipes to me – for like soul food, cornbread and that kind of thing. Doesn’t make me want to cook hog jowls, okay, but nothing makes me want to cook hog jowls. Just a thing between me and the hog.”
“That’s another thing,” JT says, heading to a specific place in the book this time. “Vegetables … meats and main dishes … protein shakes … vegetables. Collard greens. About five recipes in here for collard greens. Obviously someone eats collard greens ‘cause there’s all these recipes and I’ve heard of people eating collard greens, but what I want to know is what happens to the rest of the collard.”
“What do you mean the rest of the collard?”, says Donnie B.
“Okay, you got turnip greens – right?” JT says with a little hump-up in his voice. “And at the end of the turnip green there’s a turnip. You plant turnips to eat the turnip and in the meantime you get to eat the greens. Mustard greens, I think they eat mustard greens, you plant mustard to get at the mustard, the seed, and in the meantime you get to eat the greens. But collard greens, you plant collard, eat the greens, and do you ever get to eat the collard? I never heard of it. Just doesn’t strike me as being an efficient use of the collard, that’s all.
“Maybe there’s no such thing as the collard,” Homer says, talking like he’s shrugging his shoulders the way Homer does. “Maybe it’s just a term for the green part of something else, like acorn’s the name for the nut that comes off an oak tree.”
God, JT gets hold of something and he doesn’t want to let it go. “We’re not talking about acorns; we’re talking about collards,” he says. “And I’m not talking about the nut that comes off a collard plant. No one goes around talking about an ‘oak nut’ when they mean an acorn.”
About now Homer’s feeling like he’s got to turn down the heat on this thing before someone gets slugged over a collard, whatever it is. “C’mon, you know it’s not about the nut or the tree or the collard,” Homer says. “It’s about naming one part of a plant one thing and a different part a different thing.”
JT’s starting to let loose a little now. “Okay, but you don’t read in the dictionary under ‘potato,’ ‘The green top of a potato is called collard greens.’ Just inefficient use of the collard, that’s all.”
“Sure they use the collard down on those farms,” Homer says. “Ever hear of a horse collard?”
Before JT could whack Homer Duke pipes up, which is the signal for everyone to pay attention so they don’t miss Duke breaking up the English language like a concrete driveway. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t, but the moments he smashes the English language into smithereens are worth the times he leaves it all smooth and undisturbed. Everyone listens.
“Yeah, well, I’d like to horse-collard my son – my older son,” Duke says.
“What’d he do now, Duke?” asks Donnie B.
“It’s him and that snowboard. He says just riding the snowboard down the landhill isn’t good enough anymore.”
“The landhill? You mean the landfill hill?” Donnie B. asks. Figures what he meant all along.
“Yeah, that landhill, back behind the powder-milk plant. All the kids ride sleds and snowboards down there when there’s snow. Big hill back there; hadn’t realized the effalation they get down there. Kids ride sleds and snowboards down there, and with them having to dodge old tires sticking up and old lawn mowers and junk you’d think it’d be plenty tough, but Rory says it’s not enough of a challenge for him. He’s got his own idea of what a challenge is for him, riding his snowboard. He wants to ride his snowboard down the ski jump at Norseman Hill.”
Mort about snorts his coffee, cup and all. “Ride his snowboard off a ski jump?”, he asks.
“Yeah, figures that part where he’s in the air will be all kinds of fun. Don’t get that at all. You know me – I like that gravitational pull. I don’t mess with the loss of physics. From the takeoff he figures he’ll gain some levitation so then he can turn a few spins before he comes down. Maybe he’ll get a big hoop and have someone set one of his pals on fire so he can jump through it, like one of those Chipwood thrill shows.”
Donnie B. asks the natural question: “Does he figure on landing?”
“You know how kids are,” Duke says. His hands are real big, and when he wraps them around the Dixie cup full of coffee the cup disappears pretty much. “He’s still kinda vague on landing. I tell him he’s gotta land sometime and it’s like telling him he’s gotta pay taxes sometime. ‘Oh, I know,’ he says, all kinda dreamy, but after he’s jumped through that hoop of fire and turned a triple somersault and the bottom of the snowboard meets the top of the snowbank he’ll find out lots about landing. Or maybe it’s just the bottom of his bottom meeting the top of the snowbank, in which case he’ll find out even more about landing.”
The followup goes to Donnie B. too: “When’s he going to get to Norseman Hill when no one’s watching?”
“Oh, at night sometime, he says. Makes the fire on the hoop look better when he jumps through it. Says he’ll go up there, climb the tower, yell for one of his friends to light the hoop on fire, then slide down the jump and you know, whatever happens happens. I ask him if it won’t be harder to land when it’s dark and he says he doesn’t know how hard it is to land when it’s light, so how will he know if it’s harder in the dark? I couldn’t argue with that, so I just had another helping of those ribs made in a crackpot. Bernie gets those two crackpots going and you can smell it for miles around.”
That was enough for us, so we crumpled our cups and headed back to the mags.
Kit Kiefer appears to have worked some this summer as the following story indicates.
Just remember: don’t mess with the loss of physics . . .
Sparky
What’s a Packer wife know about cooking, anyway?
Kit Kiefer
The talk at the coffee break was just talk, the way things go before someone grabs hold of a subject and drags everyone along, the way talk at coffee breaks go. There was what they did over the weekend, the weather, the lawn, the game, the other game, then that got JT talking about a Packer wife that visited Iola couple of days before.
She stopped by the Kwilting Klub where JT’s wife belongs. "Kwilting Klub" is their spelling, or the spelling the ladies of the club chose 50 years ago. Beats "Quilting Qlub," that’s about all JT has to say for it. The Packer wife’s married to Brady Boyer, the linebacker. Not much of a linebacker, really. Managed to stay on the roster for five years through laziness on the part of the front office getting anyone to replace him, but you stay on the Green Bay roster five years and have a chin that’s all right angles and next thing you know a Ford dealer in Pulaski has you doing ads, and pretty soon you’re a sort-of celebrity, a regular on all the Monday-night Packer shows live from the bowling alley in De Pere.
Brady Boyer’s wife was there at the Kwilting Klub meeting trying to sell them a Packer wives’ cookbook for their fundraising, which is a noble gesture on her part excepting that the Kwilting Klub doesn’t do fundraising. Mostly they buy little scraps of fabric, and a couple of weekends rummage-saleing at the start of the summer gets them all the scraps of fabric they can handle. It doesn’t much seem right to hold a fundraiser, making the community buy cookbooks so the Kwilting Klub can go to rummage sales and buy little kids’ rompers. Brady Boyer’s wife was telling them they could sell the cookbooks and give the money to charity, but too many Norwegian ladies in the crowd started wondering why you’d want to do that, why you’d want to have a Kwilting Klub buy cookbooks to sell cookbooks to make money to give to some other charity or maybe the church so they could help people around Iola that need helping. Easier to just cook Odd Evenson a couple meals of tuna casserole and be done with it.
“You think about it, what’s a Packer wife know about cooking, anyway, enough to write a cookbook about it?” JT says. “First off, she’s got a husband making six hundred thousand dollars a year, and second, she’s living in Green Bay. If she doesn’t hire someone to do the cooking she’s making enough where she can carry out at Kroll’s every day of her life and still have plenty over to buy an SUV for the cat. Think she’s going to spend all day inventing cost-conscious and tasty yet nutritious meals for her and the man of the house? Hell, no.
“Second, even if she does do the cooking she’s not cooking for normal human beings, which is what Packers aren’t. None of them are exactly shaped like you or me.”
“Good thing, too,” says Homer, having a look at JT’s belly, which hadn’t got smaller over break.
“Yeah, I saw that coming,” JT says back. “They’re not shaped like you or me. They’re not. They’re either six-eight and three-fifty or five-eight and one-seventy-five or one percent body fat drinking protein-powder milkshakes four times a day. They either eat 14 steaks smothered in pork chops or nothing you don’t scoop out of a can, or nothing at all so they make weight. You gonna make a cookbook out of that?”
JT opens the cookbook right about then and pretends to read. ‘Glass of water. Take one eight-ounce glass. Fill with water from tap or bottle. Sip or gulp. Serves one to 75,328.’
“’Lead-wrapped filet. Take one eight-ounce filet mignon and wrap with neatly split and cleaned lead pipe salvaged from construction site. Broil until lead melts, about six minutes a side.
“‘Favorite family heirloom recipe for yogurt-whey smoothie,’ my eye. Maybe you want to be married to a Packer, hitch your wagon to a star and all that, but I can’t see where you’d want to cook for one, and then feel comfortable sharing your recipes with the world.’
“I dunno, JT,” Homer says. “I mean, I’ve read some of those cookbooks, read them as much as I’d read any cookbook, and sometimes you get some real good recipes – good recipes to me – for like soul food, cornbread and that kind of thing. Doesn’t make me want to cook hog jowls, okay, but nothing makes me want to cook hog jowls. Just a thing between me and the hog.”
“That’s another thing,” JT says, heading to a specific place in the book this time. “Vegetables … meats and main dishes … protein shakes … vegetables. Collard greens. About five recipes in here for collard greens. Obviously someone eats collard greens ‘cause there’s all these recipes and I’ve heard of people eating collard greens, but what I want to know is what happens to the rest of the collard.”
“What do you mean the rest of the collard?”, says Donnie B.
“Okay, you got turnip greens – right?” JT says with a little hump-up in his voice. “And at the end of the turnip green there’s a turnip. You plant turnips to eat the turnip and in the meantime you get to eat the greens. Mustard greens, I think they eat mustard greens, you plant mustard to get at the mustard, the seed, and in the meantime you get to eat the greens. But collard greens, you plant collard, eat the greens, and do you ever get to eat the collard? I never heard of it. Just doesn’t strike me as being an efficient use of the collard, that’s all.
“Maybe there’s no such thing as the collard,” Homer says, talking like he’s shrugging his shoulders the way Homer does. “Maybe it’s just a term for the green part of something else, like acorn’s the name for the nut that comes off an oak tree.”
God, JT gets hold of something and he doesn’t want to let it go. “We’re not talking about acorns; we’re talking about collards,” he says. “And I’m not talking about the nut that comes off a collard plant. No one goes around talking about an ‘oak nut’ when they mean an acorn.”
About now Homer’s feeling like he’s got to turn down the heat on this thing before someone gets slugged over a collard, whatever it is. “C’mon, you know it’s not about the nut or the tree or the collard,” Homer says. “It’s about naming one part of a plant one thing and a different part a different thing.”
JT’s starting to let loose a little now. “Okay, but you don’t read in the dictionary under ‘potato,’ ‘The green top of a potato is called collard greens.’ Just inefficient use of the collard, that’s all.”
“Sure they use the collard down on those farms,” Homer says. “Ever hear of a horse collard?”
Before JT could whack Homer Duke pipes up, which is the signal for everyone to pay attention so they don’t miss Duke breaking up the English language like a concrete driveway. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t, but the moments he smashes the English language into smithereens are worth the times he leaves it all smooth and undisturbed. Everyone listens.
“Yeah, well, I’d like to horse-collard my son – my older son,” Duke says.
“What’d he do now, Duke?” asks Donnie B.
“It’s him and that snowboard. He says just riding the snowboard down the landhill isn’t good enough anymore.”
“The landhill? You mean the landfill hill?” Donnie B. asks. Figures what he meant all along.
“Yeah, that landhill, back behind the powder-milk plant. All the kids ride sleds and snowboards down there when there’s snow. Big hill back there; hadn’t realized the effalation they get down there. Kids ride sleds and snowboards down there, and with them having to dodge old tires sticking up and old lawn mowers and junk you’d think it’d be plenty tough, but Rory says it’s not enough of a challenge for him. He’s got his own idea of what a challenge is for him, riding his snowboard. He wants to ride his snowboard down the ski jump at Norseman Hill.”
Mort about snorts his coffee, cup and all. “Ride his snowboard off a ski jump?”, he asks.
“Yeah, figures that part where he’s in the air will be all kinds of fun. Don’t get that at all. You know me – I like that gravitational pull. I don’t mess with the loss of physics. From the takeoff he figures he’ll gain some levitation so then he can turn a few spins before he comes down. Maybe he’ll get a big hoop and have someone set one of his pals on fire so he can jump through it, like one of those Chipwood thrill shows.”
Donnie B. asks the natural question: “Does he figure on landing?”
“You know how kids are,” Duke says. His hands are real big, and when he wraps them around the Dixie cup full of coffee the cup disappears pretty much. “He’s still kinda vague on landing. I tell him he’s gotta land sometime and it’s like telling him he’s gotta pay taxes sometime. ‘Oh, I know,’ he says, all kinda dreamy, but after he’s jumped through that hoop of fire and turned a triple somersault and the bottom of the snowboard meets the top of the snowbank he’ll find out lots about landing. Or maybe it’s just the bottom of his bottom meeting the top of the snowbank, in which case he’ll find out even more about landing.”
The followup goes to Donnie B. too: “When’s he going to get to Norseman Hill when no one’s watching?”
“Oh, at night sometime, he says. Makes the fire on the hoop look better when he jumps through it. Says he’ll go up there, climb the tower, yell for one of his friends to light the hoop on fire, then slide down the jump and you know, whatever happens happens. I ask him if it won’t be harder to land when it’s dark and he says he doesn’t know how hard it is to land when it’s light, so how will he know if it’s harder in the dark? I couldn’t argue with that, so I just had another helping of those ribs made in a crackpot. Bernie gets those two crackpots going and you can smell it for miles around.”
That was enough for us, so we crumpled our cups and headed back to the mags.
Sunday, March 20, 2005
Back when I had cable, before I realized that cable and credit are evil, I was watching ESPN2 when they featured coverage of a spelling bee. I think it's quite a stretch to feature spelling on a supposedly all-sports channel. But then again they never broadcast stone skipping or pool lounging either.
Judge Not . . .
by Kit Kiefer
People who see me have no idea I was once a judge in the International Stone-Skipping Competition. It's understandable. Sometimes I have trouble convincing myself.
I don't even know if there is still an International Stone-Skipping Competition. I hope there is for the sake of the stone-skippers and the judges. I suppose I could find out on the Internet, but I'm not sure if I want to. It wouldn't be the same, what with the steroids and genetically altered rocks. I do know that the organizer of the competition, a large, shaggy professional rabble-rouser named Bill Rabe, is dead. I'm sure wherever he is now he's feeding its writers a story a day, because that's just the sort of guy he was.
Bill Rabe's base of operations was Lake Superior State College up in Sault Ste. Marie, a school without much more going for it than five months of winter. In Rabe's skilled hands this sow's purse of a land-grant university became the splendiferous home of the Unicorn Hunters and the repository of words and phrases banned from the English language for misuse and overuse. He didn't quite reach his goal of having an LSSU person quoted every time a cow got stuck in a well or a government fell in Turkmenistan, but by every other measure he was the best thing that happened to Lake Superior State since the invention of the goalie mask.
Bill Rabe did such a good job with LSSU that in summertimes he was allowed to do publicity for the silk purse of Mackinac Island. Mackinac Island is a time-capsule cookie of land full of fudge shops, horse-drawn carriages and hotels with broad verandas. A lesser story-plugger would stop somewhere between quaint and charming, and mention the fudge in the last paragraph. Bill Rabe created reasons above and beyond to write about Mackinac Island, and threw in the charm for free.
One of the above-and-beyond reasons Bill Rabe created was the International Stone-Skipping Competition. Mackinac Island rolls itself into a neat ball most nights. The day-trippers go home and the staying guests, full of fudge and sun, turn in early. There's not much to do, but there are lots of flat stones and a broad expanse of water to throw them against. Bill Rabe took that raw material and whipped up a frappe of publicity. That, my friend, is genius.
If you're not familiar with the nuances of championship stone-skipping, let me tell you what I remember. On Mackinac Island skipping stones are called "petoskeys," for a town down the coast; they're shades of grey and rust, worn smooth by the lake and slightly dished on the bottom, so they have a lifting action like an airplane wing. The best skippers throwing the finest petoskeys can register 30 to 45 honest skips, not dribbles or piddles or splashes.
One of the problems with stone-skipping from a competitor's perspective is that there is no such thing as a favorite stone. You throw it, it's gone, and it's not like baseball, where the new ball is almost identical to the old ball. It's plays heck with your consistency. A good-looking stone may fizzle and a rock, a real boulder, may dance over the water like Michelle Kwan. You can't tell.
I became a stone-skipping judge nearly by accident. Bill Rabe had seen some of my travel pieces somewhere - they weren't exactly being handed out on street corners, and I know they weren't being sold - and asked me to be a judge. Not one to turn down anything free ever, I told him I couldn't promise that any stories I'd write would be printed, but if he was looking for someone who could impartially and accurately determine the number of skips and pittypats a stone takes on its way down, and eat fudge like a champ, I was his guy. In return I received a package of random scraps of paper that turned out to be coupons for free fudge, free horse rides, a lifetime pass to the rocking chairs on the porch of the Grand Hotel, and free bicycle rentals, a package of value that still staggers me. I don't think a man ever received better swag, considering where he was at the time.
At the time I was driving the '63 Plymouth Fury that I got from my brother in exchange for an electric guitar. Going anywhere with that car was an adventure - not that it didn't get me there, but that something always failed on the way. The brakes, the muffler, the alternator all went out on one of my trips, and only the fact that I was young and didn't know cars weren't supposed to do this kept me from giving up driving altogether. I once drove it all the way from Knoxville to Wisconsin with a broken universal joint, and the mechanic said, "You did what?"
This time the trip across the Upper Peninsula was uneventful, or at least I remember it as uneventful. Most trips across the UP are. Something huge has to happen, like a moose forcing his way into your back seat or civilization appearing out of the mist, for a trip across the UP to be anything but ho-hum.
But anyway. I parked the car in the ferryboat lot and rode the ferry over to the island. I've been on roller coasters and on canoes caught up in waterspouts, but never anything like this ferry going across the straits to the island. I didn't eat much in those days, which was a very good thing, because I wouldn't have held onto it for the duration. Bill Rabe met me somewhere in the vicinity of the dock, patted me on the back - which I really didn't need -- and whisked me off to the first event.
The events run together as I try to remember them, but one of the first was the HMS Queen Mary Deck Chair Lounging Competition. The Grand Hotel, the whitest hotel on Mackinac Island and the one with the biggest, broadest porch, some time back acquired the deck chairs of the Queen Mary, chairs sat in by some of history's most famous posteriors, and installed them around the planked wooden deck of the Grand Hotel's pool. People were then invited to lounge in them and pretend they were aboard the world's most famous transatlantic ocean liner. That would be the only thing they could dream, because as lounging apparatus they were comfortable as freshly split cordwood.
The difficulty with the lounging competition besides the composition of the chairs was the weather at Mackinac Island, which all times of year could best be described as bracing. There are days of soaking, soothing warmth on Mackinac Island, certainly, but the days I was there - typical Mackinac Island days, I was told - featured a brisk wind and the sparkling blue skies possible only with what the weathermen call "Canadian high pressure." Nothing comes out of Canada warm, so the dozen or so loungers whom Rabe earnestly rousted off the porch and out of the fudge shops laid on the hard wooden chairs and exposed their flesh gingerly, as though it were New Year's Day and the next stop was a plunge into the Big Two-Hearted River.
Judging the loungers was a piece of cake. Whoever kept their composure and kept from shivering the longest won. Keeping one's eyes closed and thinking warm thoughts was the usual technique, so powers of suggestion were at a premium. There's a picture of me in my lone, worn, salmon-colored Izod polo shirt, holding a clipboard in my hand and evaluating a bikini-clad young lady who I believe was later crowned winner. She was all of 14 but looked older. Bill Rabe got the picture on the Associated Press wire with a gaudy cutline underneath, that old fox.
The rest of the long weekend blurs, except for breakfasts, the croquet game and the stone-skipping competition. I don't know quite how he managed it, but Rabe got me breakfasts at the Grand Hotel and no other meals. (I stayed on the town's main street in a lesser hotel that appeared to have been built shortly after the Civil War and whose chief characteristic, I discovered, was a propensity to burn down with great loss of life. I never closed my window the whole time I was there, just to be safe.) I ordered Michigan blueberries and cream for breakfast and watched the sun, so warm-looking, stream across the broad lake and through the gauzy curtains. I have never again lived so well so early in the morning.
The croquet game was held on the lawn of the Grand Hotel on a piece of turf that rolled and pitched and had probably never seen the game before. If there are subtleties to be grasped in the game of croquet we didn't grasp them. The martinis didn't help our appreciation of croquet, though I went with soda and fudge and still disgraced the game. The scene was the thing far more than the croquet match: what appeared to be the privileged class enjoying their privileges in front of a hotel that hadn't changed its face in a century, on a day where the sky was a hard northern blue, the sun the color of the center of a daisy and the shade almost black, it contrasted so with the intensity of the sunshine. Nothing ever moves in my memory of this scene; it stands frozen like a painting, which it may well have been.
The stone-skipping contest was held on my last day there, which may have been the fourth of July. The only other judge I remember was a correspondent from Newsweek who dressed like he had just been shipped in from Vietnam, with a sweat-stained vest bulging with pockets and shorts full of more pockets, all of which were more than capable of holding fudge. We talked about bad places to drive. I nominated Quebec City, which I had visited with my parents when I was 12. He chose Cairo, which he suggested was his last port of call. We hit it off regardless.
The skippers were an odd lot: summer help from the hotels, locals, tourists on a goof, and a handful who took the competition as a sport to be studied and trained for. I asked one of the serious participants what he does to prepare. He said, "I throw rocks." What else could he say?
The competition began. I was introduced as a writer for a magazine which I no longer wrote for because it no longer existed. I felt no shame. With the first flick of a stone the competitors separated themselves immediately. The tourists all failed in their efforts to get their stones to make more than five or six honest skips. Most of them took stones that were too light, I learned later. Weight distribution -- that's the key in picking a proper petoskey. Most of the summer help departed, along with some of the locals and a surprising number of the serious competitors. Bad water conditions, they explained later. So much can go wrong when the lake churns on a skipper used to calm waters.
Finally the contest came down to two locals - a slender Canadian from the Soo and another person, I believe much larger, from the Michigan side. The Canadian waded out 20 feet and threw his last stone. I recall we gave him 32 skips but were being generous because he was perceived as the underdog and the fellow from Newsweek and I wanted him to win.
No matter the count, the runner-up didn't grouse, the winner held the trophy high, everyone shook hands and that was that. I checked out of the downtown firetrap, caught the lurching, bouncing ferry back to shore, fired up the Plymouth Fury and headed for home. I wrote stories about the contest and tried to sell them but no one bought. I feel I betrayed Bill Rabe, and though he said he understood I was never invited back. It was just as well; the thing was bound to lose its luster after a while. Still, I was just getting the hang of being a judge. I'm sure that had there been a next time not a single pittypat or slouching lounger would have gotten past me.
Judge Not . . .
by Kit Kiefer
People who see me have no idea I was once a judge in the International Stone-Skipping Competition. It's understandable. Sometimes I have trouble convincing myself.
I don't even know if there is still an International Stone-Skipping Competition. I hope there is for the sake of the stone-skippers and the judges. I suppose I could find out on the Internet, but I'm not sure if I want to. It wouldn't be the same, what with the steroids and genetically altered rocks. I do know that the organizer of the competition, a large, shaggy professional rabble-rouser named Bill Rabe, is dead. I'm sure wherever he is now he's feeding its writers a story a day, because that's just the sort of guy he was.
Bill Rabe's base of operations was Lake Superior State College up in Sault Ste. Marie, a school without much more going for it than five months of winter. In Rabe's skilled hands this sow's purse of a land-grant university became the splendiferous home of the Unicorn Hunters and the repository of words and phrases banned from the English language for misuse and overuse. He didn't quite reach his goal of having an LSSU person quoted every time a cow got stuck in a well or a government fell in Turkmenistan, but by every other measure he was the best thing that happened to Lake Superior State since the invention of the goalie mask.
Bill Rabe did such a good job with LSSU that in summertimes he was allowed to do publicity for the silk purse of Mackinac Island. Mackinac Island is a time-capsule cookie of land full of fudge shops, horse-drawn carriages and hotels with broad verandas. A lesser story-plugger would stop somewhere between quaint and charming, and mention the fudge in the last paragraph. Bill Rabe created reasons above and beyond to write about Mackinac Island, and threw in the charm for free.
One of the above-and-beyond reasons Bill Rabe created was the International Stone-Skipping Competition. Mackinac Island rolls itself into a neat ball most nights. The day-trippers go home and the staying guests, full of fudge and sun, turn in early. There's not much to do, but there are lots of flat stones and a broad expanse of water to throw them against. Bill Rabe took that raw material and whipped up a frappe of publicity. That, my friend, is genius.
If you're not familiar with the nuances of championship stone-skipping, let me tell you what I remember. On Mackinac Island skipping stones are called "petoskeys," for a town down the coast; they're shades of grey and rust, worn smooth by the lake and slightly dished on the bottom, so they have a lifting action like an airplane wing. The best skippers throwing the finest petoskeys can register 30 to 45 honest skips, not dribbles or piddles or splashes.
One of the problems with stone-skipping from a competitor's perspective is that there is no such thing as a favorite stone. You throw it, it's gone, and it's not like baseball, where the new ball is almost identical to the old ball. It's plays heck with your consistency. A good-looking stone may fizzle and a rock, a real boulder, may dance over the water like Michelle Kwan. You can't tell.
I became a stone-skipping judge nearly by accident. Bill Rabe had seen some of my travel pieces somewhere - they weren't exactly being handed out on street corners, and I know they weren't being sold - and asked me to be a judge. Not one to turn down anything free ever, I told him I couldn't promise that any stories I'd write would be printed, but if he was looking for someone who could impartially and accurately determine the number of skips and pittypats a stone takes on its way down, and eat fudge like a champ, I was his guy. In return I received a package of random scraps of paper that turned out to be coupons for free fudge, free horse rides, a lifetime pass to the rocking chairs on the porch of the Grand Hotel, and free bicycle rentals, a package of value that still staggers me. I don't think a man ever received better swag, considering where he was at the time.
At the time I was driving the '63 Plymouth Fury that I got from my brother in exchange for an electric guitar. Going anywhere with that car was an adventure - not that it didn't get me there, but that something always failed on the way. The brakes, the muffler, the alternator all went out on one of my trips, and only the fact that I was young and didn't know cars weren't supposed to do this kept me from giving up driving altogether. I once drove it all the way from Knoxville to Wisconsin with a broken universal joint, and the mechanic said, "You did what?"
This time the trip across the Upper Peninsula was uneventful, or at least I remember it as uneventful. Most trips across the UP are. Something huge has to happen, like a moose forcing his way into your back seat or civilization appearing out of the mist, for a trip across the UP to be anything but ho-hum.
But anyway. I parked the car in the ferryboat lot and rode the ferry over to the island. I've been on roller coasters and on canoes caught up in waterspouts, but never anything like this ferry going across the straits to the island. I didn't eat much in those days, which was a very good thing, because I wouldn't have held onto it for the duration. Bill Rabe met me somewhere in the vicinity of the dock, patted me on the back - which I really didn't need -- and whisked me off to the first event.
The events run together as I try to remember them, but one of the first was the HMS Queen Mary Deck Chair Lounging Competition. The Grand Hotel, the whitest hotel on Mackinac Island and the one with the biggest, broadest porch, some time back acquired the deck chairs of the Queen Mary, chairs sat in by some of history's most famous posteriors, and installed them around the planked wooden deck of the Grand Hotel's pool. People were then invited to lounge in them and pretend they were aboard the world's most famous transatlantic ocean liner. That would be the only thing they could dream, because as lounging apparatus they were comfortable as freshly split cordwood.
The difficulty with the lounging competition besides the composition of the chairs was the weather at Mackinac Island, which all times of year could best be described as bracing. There are days of soaking, soothing warmth on Mackinac Island, certainly, but the days I was there - typical Mackinac Island days, I was told - featured a brisk wind and the sparkling blue skies possible only with what the weathermen call "Canadian high pressure." Nothing comes out of Canada warm, so the dozen or so loungers whom Rabe earnestly rousted off the porch and out of the fudge shops laid on the hard wooden chairs and exposed their flesh gingerly, as though it were New Year's Day and the next stop was a plunge into the Big Two-Hearted River.
Judging the loungers was a piece of cake. Whoever kept their composure and kept from shivering the longest won. Keeping one's eyes closed and thinking warm thoughts was the usual technique, so powers of suggestion were at a premium. There's a picture of me in my lone, worn, salmon-colored Izod polo shirt, holding a clipboard in my hand and evaluating a bikini-clad young lady who I believe was later crowned winner. She was all of 14 but looked older. Bill Rabe got the picture on the Associated Press wire with a gaudy cutline underneath, that old fox.
The rest of the long weekend blurs, except for breakfasts, the croquet game and the stone-skipping competition. I don't know quite how he managed it, but Rabe got me breakfasts at the Grand Hotel and no other meals. (I stayed on the town's main street in a lesser hotel that appeared to have been built shortly after the Civil War and whose chief characteristic, I discovered, was a propensity to burn down with great loss of life. I never closed my window the whole time I was there, just to be safe.) I ordered Michigan blueberries and cream for breakfast and watched the sun, so warm-looking, stream across the broad lake and through the gauzy curtains. I have never again lived so well so early in the morning.
The croquet game was held on the lawn of the Grand Hotel on a piece of turf that rolled and pitched and had probably never seen the game before. If there are subtleties to be grasped in the game of croquet we didn't grasp them. The martinis didn't help our appreciation of croquet, though I went with soda and fudge and still disgraced the game. The scene was the thing far more than the croquet match: what appeared to be the privileged class enjoying their privileges in front of a hotel that hadn't changed its face in a century, on a day where the sky was a hard northern blue, the sun the color of the center of a daisy and the shade almost black, it contrasted so with the intensity of the sunshine. Nothing ever moves in my memory of this scene; it stands frozen like a painting, which it may well have been.
The stone-skipping contest was held on my last day there, which may have been the fourth of July. The only other judge I remember was a correspondent from Newsweek who dressed like he had just been shipped in from Vietnam, with a sweat-stained vest bulging with pockets and shorts full of more pockets, all of which were more than capable of holding fudge. We talked about bad places to drive. I nominated Quebec City, which I had visited with my parents when I was 12. He chose Cairo, which he suggested was his last port of call. We hit it off regardless.
The skippers were an odd lot: summer help from the hotels, locals, tourists on a goof, and a handful who took the competition as a sport to be studied and trained for. I asked one of the serious participants what he does to prepare. He said, "I throw rocks." What else could he say?
The competition began. I was introduced as a writer for a magazine which I no longer wrote for because it no longer existed. I felt no shame. With the first flick of a stone the competitors separated themselves immediately. The tourists all failed in their efforts to get their stones to make more than five or six honest skips. Most of them took stones that were too light, I learned later. Weight distribution -- that's the key in picking a proper petoskey. Most of the summer help departed, along with some of the locals and a surprising number of the serious competitors. Bad water conditions, they explained later. So much can go wrong when the lake churns on a skipper used to calm waters.
Finally the contest came down to two locals - a slender Canadian from the Soo and another person, I believe much larger, from the Michigan side. The Canadian waded out 20 feet and threw his last stone. I recall we gave him 32 skips but were being generous because he was perceived as the underdog and the fellow from Newsweek and I wanted him to win.
No matter the count, the runner-up didn't grouse, the winner held the trophy high, everyone shook hands and that was that. I checked out of the downtown firetrap, caught the lurching, bouncing ferry back to shore, fired up the Plymouth Fury and headed for home. I wrote stories about the contest and tried to sell them but no one bought. I feel I betrayed Bill Rabe, and though he said he understood I was never invited back. It was just as well; the thing was bound to lose its luster after a while. Still, I was just getting the hang of being a judge. I'm sure that had there been a next time not a single pittypat or slouching lounger would have gotten past me.
Saturday, February 19, 2005
Indispensable?
Sometime when you are feeling important,
sometime when your ego is in bloom.
Sometime when you take it for granted,
you're the best qualified in the room.
Sometime when you feel that your going,
would leave an unfillable hole.
Just follow these simple instructions,
and see how it humbles your soul.
Take a bucket and fill it with water,
put your hand in it up to the wrist.
Pull it out and the hole that's remaining,
is the measure of how much you'll be missed.
You may splash all you want when you enter,
you can stir up the water galore,
but stop and you'll find in a minute,
that it looks quite the same as before.
The moral of this quaint example is--
Always do the best that you can.
Be proud of yourself but remember,
There is no indispensable man.
--In memory of Russ Seals, Jr.
Sometime when you are feeling important,
sometime when your ego is in bloom.
Sometime when you take it for granted,
you're the best qualified in the room.
Sometime when you feel that your going,
would leave an unfillable hole.
Just follow these simple instructions,
and see how it humbles your soul.
Take a bucket and fill it with water,
put your hand in it up to the wrist.
Pull it out and the hole that's remaining,
is the measure of how much you'll be missed.
You may splash all you want when you enter,
you can stir up the water galore,
but stop and you'll find in a minute,
that it looks quite the same as before.
The moral of this quaint example is--
Always do the best that you can.
Be proud of yourself but remember,
There is no indispensable man.
--In memory of Russ Seals, Jr.
Wednesday, December 15, 2004
I love a good holiday story especially when it involves fisticuffs or a reasonable facsimile . . .
How Tough Can Christmas Be?
by Kit Kiefer
Guy decides to be melancholy for Christmas, not a lot you can do about it. Maybe it’s his kids all grown up so there’s no more fun in opening train sets and Lincoln Logs. Maybe it’s him all grown up and no more of that fun left for him, just socks and what he knows is coming because he wrote the list and she always follows the list. It’s thinking of time passing and missing his own mom and dad maybe, just too many good times that were so he’s not too sure about the are.
Company tries a little to spread the cheer, but not too hard. It’s in the magazine business not the Christmas business, though the old guy that owns the company likes to walk the halls wishing Good Christmas to all. We wish him Good Christmas back and mean it. He’s the grandpa always slipping you oranges and hazelnuts, even if you don’t like hazelnuts.
For Christmas the company puts up trees, about as tall as your head, in every spare corner of every department, all put up and decorated by company people. Some trees have wrapped boxes underneath, and some wrapped boxes have real presents inside. Those are back in Typesetting and Production, where the local ladies find it quite a wonderful thing to draw names and buy presents and stick them under their department trees, and then make little luncheon parties of things made with crescent dough and cream cheese, recipes they get from someone called The Pampered Chef. They turn their chairs around from their monitors and light tables to lunch on veggie pizza and shrimp dip and eat and talk for a few minutes, open their presents, let go a little squeal about who had their name and whose name they had, and then turn their chairs back around to their monitors and light tables. Only the dirty dishes show that anything different happened that noon. Ladies talk about it for months.
Back in Sales, though, the party never stops and the chairs never turn back to the desks when it’s been a good year for baseball cards. Happy advertisers send food and drink. One year a freshly minted millionaire sends a packing crate, size of a small refrigerator, packed with booze – all sorts, two-liter bottle of wine cooler to a fifth of Chivas. Sales and Editorial had a little party that spring. That’s the one where Duke and his family arrive just in time for the buffet, pull chairs up to the buffet table and tuck right in. Liquor doesn’t cast any spell on them.
Guy can still get melancholy about Christmas in the middle of all this, though, and this year it’s JT’s turn. JT doesn’t sell ads for sports but sits close enough to those that do that he talks their talk, enough to pinch-hit when the regular sports ad guys are at lunch or at shows or just plain grouchy. JT is getting to be about mid-‘40s, used to play basketball and baseball real good but doesn’t any more, has a wife lives in Green Bay and no kids. He spends weeks in Iola and weekends in Green Bay, which is a tough way to live as far as the weeks in Iola go. Somehow the being in Iola for the weeks before Christmas got him this year and he got the melancholies. He’d laugh at Dukisms – like you couldn’t – but practically anything else just left him long-faced and sad, like Jack Benny without the punch lines.
We tried to perk up JT about the same way the company tried to get us all in the Christmas spirit, about as effectively. Just a little smile and then back to doing paperwork, not even wanting to talk to anyone on the phone unless they called. Sales guy starts doing that you know he’s in the dumps.
It happens that the Christmas JT gets the holiday blues is also the Christmas the Green Bay Packer All-Stars play a basketball exhibition in Iola day before Christmas Eve. Packers always scrape together a team of players to play basketball around the state in winter raising money for whatever local charity brings them to town, but usually not as early as day before Christmas Eve. The Packers are still usually playing by then. People doing the scheduling must have seen the writing on the wall, because the regular season ended two days before and the Packers were out of the playoffs by October.
Way these exhibitions work is that the local charity gets a team together to play the Packers. Packers almost always win, though sometimes you get a hotshot wants to show Packers a thing or two about basketball, and he goes off for fifty-something. Nothing you can do about the hotshots, though people don’t come to see hotshots, not even local hotshots. They come to see whether Packers can play basketball or not. It’s split about fifty-fifty between the can-plays and the can-nots. Big guys are usually just big. Little guys can jump out of the gym but like to shoot those 30-footers that make a nice dinner-bell sound when they bang off the rim. Not a lot of offense between those two groups, but it’s usually enough to beat the local Lions club, who happened to sponsor the exhibition in Iola two days before Christmas.
Even though JT lives in Green Bay really he belongs to the Iola Lions, which is not a real young organization. Give you an idea of how young, about half the Lions are also Sons of Norway, and Sons of Norway don’t take anyone under 70. Don’t know what JT sees in that bunch. Long and short of it is that JT winds up on the team that’s playing the Packers, and since he’s tallest of the bunch he’s the starting center.
JT playing center doesn’t bring out the crowds except those from the company, like Whitey and O’Strowski, who follow pro wrestling and these fixed carnage events. Still, day before Christmas Eve there’s not much else to do, so nearly everyone from town still left in town comes out to the high-school gym to watch the Lions Club play the Packers. Doesn’t even matter that the Packers aren’t really Packers, not the stars anyway but the backups and the waiver-wire types. It’s good enough for when and where.
Teams warming up, guys running layup drills you don’t see much, but when they introduce the Lions Club players Whitey says, “Check out JT. He’s got blood in his eyes.” Sure enough; whether it’s Christmas blues working their way up to the surface or knowing it’s his last shot at glory on the court or what, but JT comes running out on the court like a bull, snorting superheated steam out his nostrils. He’s playing for real even if nobody else is. JT gets like this sometimes first week of softball season, but by sixth inning he’s pulled a hamstring and he’s himself again. Seeing him like this on a basketball court scares couple guys that know him. They’re not sure what to expect, other than a hamstring pull.
JT loses the opening tip but hustles back down on D, and when one of these little Packer guys clangs off a shot JT boxes out his guy – big tackle off the taxi squad, never did much all year but lift weights and get yelled at – about 20 feet away from the basket, boxes him out hard, throws his butt into the tackle’s legs, grabs the rebound and sticks an elbow out either side of the ball. He spins around the elbows and ball, doesn’t hit anybody thank God, and passes the ball upcourt. The big tackle he boxed out just stands there staring. No one put that much body on him all football season, now he’s in an exhibition basketball game in Iola of all places and he’s getting the butt series from the starting center for the Lions Club. He doesn’t get it.
It takes about three or four times down the court for the big tackle to get it that JT is damned serious about the whole thing, so then this tackle gets serious too. Calls for the ball, backs down JT, bowls him over, bangs the ball in the basket no foul called, points, talks some. This happens couple times down the court and then it’s JT’s turn to get steamed. He starts pushing hard back at this tackle in a way you shouldn’t, first to a 280-pound Green Bay Packer and second in a just-for-fun game, so one of the other Lions takes him aside, reads him the Lions’ oath or something and gets JT to settle down. Gives him a different guy to guard, too, guy who likes to play 30 feet out from the basket where JT doesn’t care as much about muscling up and boxing out. Still has blood in his eyes, though. Whitey can see the blood in his eyes.
Game goes on pretty good, people enjoying the show, Lions playing okay for a team where JT is the youngest player and the star center, when one of the Packers launches a shot. JT sees it going up from the other side and comes storming into the lane on an angle for the rebound. Ball bounces off the rim to his side and he grabs it – doesn’t jump in the air really, but grabs it and hangs on like he did before, with the elbows pointing out. JT swings the elbows around again and his time there’s something in his way, namely the head of the big tackle who had stumbled a little going for the ball so his head isn’t a full head above JT’s any more but is right at elbow level. JT just nails him, sounds like a hammer hitting a watermelon. It is, as Whitey says later, a beautiful shot, a glorious blow to the head. If angels swung elbows that’s how they’d hit. Tackle goes down like a water buffalo, just a big whump! like he was shot by Ernest Hemingway, and he’s out flat.
Tackle doesn’t stay out more than a minute, and when he gets up now he’s the one with blood in his eyes, and all he wants is to put some real blood in the eyes of the guy who owns the elbows. Not appreciating the beauty of the head shot at all. Not a good thing to happen in a charity game two days before Christmas in Iola versus the Lions Club, though Whitey and O’Strowsky are up in the stands bouncing up and down on their hands thinking they got their money’s worth.
Fight, such as it is, doesn’t last long. The old Sons of Norway Lions, these wiry geezers, come bouncing out of the front row and make sort of a human Norwegian shield around JT, then Duke comes bouncing down from the stands and gets between JT and the tackle, and when Duke’s in the middle you can’t reach over to the other side. Duke and a couple of the older Lions convince JT and the tackle it would be better for the game if each of them didn’t play any more, and if you can believe it JT’s okay with that. He’s more than okay. He’s wearing a smile that’d bust his face apart, smile he hasn’t shown in months. In fact, at halftime he comes up to where O’Strowsky and Duke and Whitey and Mort are sitting, and he’s bubbling, just bubbling over. “How about that!” he gushes. “How about that! ‘Merry Christmas to all, and to all lights out.’ Lights out! Wasn’t that something – something, I mean the way he went down?”
Whitey smiles that sly smile of his and says, “Beautiful. You laid him out beautiful, JT. If his season wasn’t over as of Sunday it’s over now. He’ll be happy to go back playing football.”
“That’s just what I was thinking,” JT carries on. “What’s football after a shot like that, huh? What’s football?”
Guy gets melancholy about Christmas, but it never seems to last. Something happens. Something always happens. Christmas blues are gone. Bring on the holidays! If the holidays give him any trouble, give ‘em an elbow to the temple and bang! If JT can flatten a Packer, how tough can Christmas be?
How Tough Can Christmas Be?
by Kit Kiefer
Guy decides to be melancholy for Christmas, not a lot you can do about it. Maybe it’s his kids all grown up so there’s no more fun in opening train sets and Lincoln Logs. Maybe it’s him all grown up and no more of that fun left for him, just socks and what he knows is coming because he wrote the list and she always follows the list. It’s thinking of time passing and missing his own mom and dad maybe, just too many good times that were so he’s not too sure about the are.
Company tries a little to spread the cheer, but not too hard. It’s in the magazine business not the Christmas business, though the old guy that owns the company likes to walk the halls wishing Good Christmas to all. We wish him Good Christmas back and mean it. He’s the grandpa always slipping you oranges and hazelnuts, even if you don’t like hazelnuts.
For Christmas the company puts up trees, about as tall as your head, in every spare corner of every department, all put up and decorated by company people. Some trees have wrapped boxes underneath, and some wrapped boxes have real presents inside. Those are back in Typesetting and Production, where the local ladies find it quite a wonderful thing to draw names and buy presents and stick them under their department trees, and then make little luncheon parties of things made with crescent dough and cream cheese, recipes they get from someone called The Pampered Chef. They turn their chairs around from their monitors and light tables to lunch on veggie pizza and shrimp dip and eat and talk for a few minutes, open their presents, let go a little squeal about who had their name and whose name they had, and then turn their chairs back around to their monitors and light tables. Only the dirty dishes show that anything different happened that noon. Ladies talk about it for months.
Back in Sales, though, the party never stops and the chairs never turn back to the desks when it’s been a good year for baseball cards. Happy advertisers send food and drink. One year a freshly minted millionaire sends a packing crate, size of a small refrigerator, packed with booze – all sorts, two-liter bottle of wine cooler to a fifth of Chivas. Sales and Editorial had a little party that spring. That’s the one where Duke and his family arrive just in time for the buffet, pull chairs up to the buffet table and tuck right in. Liquor doesn’t cast any spell on them.
Guy can still get melancholy about Christmas in the middle of all this, though, and this year it’s JT’s turn. JT doesn’t sell ads for sports but sits close enough to those that do that he talks their talk, enough to pinch-hit when the regular sports ad guys are at lunch or at shows or just plain grouchy. JT is getting to be about mid-‘40s, used to play basketball and baseball real good but doesn’t any more, has a wife lives in Green Bay and no kids. He spends weeks in Iola and weekends in Green Bay, which is a tough way to live as far as the weeks in Iola go. Somehow the being in Iola for the weeks before Christmas got him this year and he got the melancholies. He’d laugh at Dukisms – like you couldn’t – but practically anything else just left him long-faced and sad, like Jack Benny without the punch lines.
We tried to perk up JT about the same way the company tried to get us all in the Christmas spirit, about as effectively. Just a little smile and then back to doing paperwork, not even wanting to talk to anyone on the phone unless they called. Sales guy starts doing that you know he’s in the dumps.
It happens that the Christmas JT gets the holiday blues is also the Christmas the Green Bay Packer All-Stars play a basketball exhibition in Iola day before Christmas Eve. Packers always scrape together a team of players to play basketball around the state in winter raising money for whatever local charity brings them to town, but usually not as early as day before Christmas Eve. The Packers are still usually playing by then. People doing the scheduling must have seen the writing on the wall, because the regular season ended two days before and the Packers were out of the playoffs by October.
Way these exhibitions work is that the local charity gets a team together to play the Packers. Packers almost always win, though sometimes you get a hotshot wants to show Packers a thing or two about basketball, and he goes off for fifty-something. Nothing you can do about the hotshots, though people don’t come to see hotshots, not even local hotshots. They come to see whether Packers can play basketball or not. It’s split about fifty-fifty between the can-plays and the can-nots. Big guys are usually just big. Little guys can jump out of the gym but like to shoot those 30-footers that make a nice dinner-bell sound when they bang off the rim. Not a lot of offense between those two groups, but it’s usually enough to beat the local Lions club, who happened to sponsor the exhibition in Iola two days before Christmas.
Even though JT lives in Green Bay really he belongs to the Iola Lions, which is not a real young organization. Give you an idea of how young, about half the Lions are also Sons of Norway, and Sons of Norway don’t take anyone under 70. Don’t know what JT sees in that bunch. Long and short of it is that JT winds up on the team that’s playing the Packers, and since he’s tallest of the bunch he’s the starting center.
JT playing center doesn’t bring out the crowds except those from the company, like Whitey and O’Strowski, who follow pro wrestling and these fixed carnage events. Still, day before Christmas Eve there’s not much else to do, so nearly everyone from town still left in town comes out to the high-school gym to watch the Lions Club play the Packers. Doesn’t even matter that the Packers aren’t really Packers, not the stars anyway but the backups and the waiver-wire types. It’s good enough for when and where.
Teams warming up, guys running layup drills you don’t see much, but when they introduce the Lions Club players Whitey says, “Check out JT. He’s got blood in his eyes.” Sure enough; whether it’s Christmas blues working their way up to the surface or knowing it’s his last shot at glory on the court or what, but JT comes running out on the court like a bull, snorting superheated steam out his nostrils. He’s playing for real even if nobody else is. JT gets like this sometimes first week of softball season, but by sixth inning he’s pulled a hamstring and he’s himself again. Seeing him like this on a basketball court scares couple guys that know him. They’re not sure what to expect, other than a hamstring pull.
JT loses the opening tip but hustles back down on D, and when one of these little Packer guys clangs off a shot JT boxes out his guy – big tackle off the taxi squad, never did much all year but lift weights and get yelled at – about 20 feet away from the basket, boxes him out hard, throws his butt into the tackle’s legs, grabs the rebound and sticks an elbow out either side of the ball. He spins around the elbows and ball, doesn’t hit anybody thank God, and passes the ball upcourt. The big tackle he boxed out just stands there staring. No one put that much body on him all football season, now he’s in an exhibition basketball game in Iola of all places and he’s getting the butt series from the starting center for the Lions Club. He doesn’t get it.
It takes about three or four times down the court for the big tackle to get it that JT is damned serious about the whole thing, so then this tackle gets serious too. Calls for the ball, backs down JT, bowls him over, bangs the ball in the basket no foul called, points, talks some. This happens couple times down the court and then it’s JT’s turn to get steamed. He starts pushing hard back at this tackle in a way you shouldn’t, first to a 280-pound Green Bay Packer and second in a just-for-fun game, so one of the other Lions takes him aside, reads him the Lions’ oath or something and gets JT to settle down. Gives him a different guy to guard, too, guy who likes to play 30 feet out from the basket where JT doesn’t care as much about muscling up and boxing out. Still has blood in his eyes, though. Whitey can see the blood in his eyes.
Game goes on pretty good, people enjoying the show, Lions playing okay for a team where JT is the youngest player and the star center, when one of the Packers launches a shot. JT sees it going up from the other side and comes storming into the lane on an angle for the rebound. Ball bounces off the rim to his side and he grabs it – doesn’t jump in the air really, but grabs it and hangs on like he did before, with the elbows pointing out. JT swings the elbows around again and his time there’s something in his way, namely the head of the big tackle who had stumbled a little going for the ball so his head isn’t a full head above JT’s any more but is right at elbow level. JT just nails him, sounds like a hammer hitting a watermelon. It is, as Whitey says later, a beautiful shot, a glorious blow to the head. If angels swung elbows that’s how they’d hit. Tackle goes down like a water buffalo, just a big whump! like he was shot by Ernest Hemingway, and he’s out flat.
Tackle doesn’t stay out more than a minute, and when he gets up now he’s the one with blood in his eyes, and all he wants is to put some real blood in the eyes of the guy who owns the elbows. Not appreciating the beauty of the head shot at all. Not a good thing to happen in a charity game two days before Christmas in Iola versus the Lions Club, though Whitey and O’Strowsky are up in the stands bouncing up and down on their hands thinking they got their money’s worth.
Fight, such as it is, doesn’t last long. The old Sons of Norway Lions, these wiry geezers, come bouncing out of the front row and make sort of a human Norwegian shield around JT, then Duke comes bouncing down from the stands and gets between JT and the tackle, and when Duke’s in the middle you can’t reach over to the other side. Duke and a couple of the older Lions convince JT and the tackle it would be better for the game if each of them didn’t play any more, and if you can believe it JT’s okay with that. He’s more than okay. He’s wearing a smile that’d bust his face apart, smile he hasn’t shown in months. In fact, at halftime he comes up to where O’Strowsky and Duke and Whitey and Mort are sitting, and he’s bubbling, just bubbling over. “How about that!” he gushes. “How about that! ‘Merry Christmas to all, and to all lights out.’ Lights out! Wasn’t that something – something, I mean the way he went down?”
Whitey smiles that sly smile of his and says, “Beautiful. You laid him out beautiful, JT. If his season wasn’t over as of Sunday it’s over now. He’ll be happy to go back playing football.”
“That’s just what I was thinking,” JT carries on. “What’s football after a shot like that, huh? What’s football?”
Guy gets melancholy about Christmas, but it never seems to last. Something happens. Something always happens. Christmas blues are gone. Bring on the holidays! If the holidays give him any trouble, give ‘em an elbow to the temple and bang! If JT can flatten a Packer, how tough can Christmas be?
Thursday, September 09, 2004
It's a long cold winter up there in Wisconsin. So you gotta be a real fan if you're willing to sell your snowmobile.
It's unforgettable, only Waynie can't remember it
by Kit Kiefer
People who drive to Backtracks Bar say it's off the beaten path, which it is for those that drive. But the thing about it is to not drive to the place, and then it's not off the beaten path at all.
Backtracks is down County Trunk J to another county trunk, called CJ on account of it crossing C and J at different points on its way through,
and then down Five Mile Road to Woarstell Road, and there's no better way to get there with a car.
If you're on a snowmobile, now, that's another story. The main snowmobile trail between Stevens Point and Green Bay runs right past Backtracks, and it's at about a spot where if you're running from Waupaca to Shawano, or all the way from Point to Green Bay - not that that happens much, even when sleds go 60 and get away with it - you're likely to need a little bit of thirst-quenching or hand-warming, or a combination of the two. Backtracks is an old country bar that sticks around because of the snowmobile trade and a couple of horseshoe pits for the summertime crowd.
The thing with a bar like this in the summertime is you always know who you're going to find inside and in the wintertime you never know who you're going to find inside except for the guys you find inside in the summertime, too.
So in the wintertime at Backtracks you got the guys who curl up cozy in the corner, close to the restroom and the dart machine and far away from the door, and those that come stomping in with a big swirl of cold air and snowflakes behind them, looking like their heads are gonna brush the ceiling and shouting, 'cause they just got off their snowmobiles and took off their helmets and forgot they can hear now. All they want to do is get refreshed, play "Free Bird" on the jukebox, slam their shots of peppermint schnapps and then take off right away. Ships that pass in the night, they are. Sleds that pass in the night. No one fights or shouts between the two groups, but the year-'round crowd does stick to their own and talk about their own, no matter what roisterers in black jumpsuits are being boisterous at the other end.
This particular night was in February, just on the wintertime side of Valentine's Day, with about three or four weeks of midnight shouting and carrying on before they melt for the winter. Boomer, who is one of the most regular of regulars on account of owning the farm next door and supplying the land for the horseshoe pits, is at the bar working his way through a Miller Lite and fishing for things to talk about with Buddha, who's a good listener but not the best at starting conversations, especially when it's after midnight and he's been at the Budweiser for a couple hours.
"Seen Waynie at all tonight?", Boomer asks, though he knows very well that Buddha hasn't seen Waynie because Boomer hasn't seen Waynie, and Buddha gets around less than Boomer, if that's possible.
"Na," says Buddha. Buddha has a real name of Gary, but he gets this name because he's a softball pitcher in the summertime on account of he's fat and can't run but he can hit some, and if you're a fat and can hit some you're a pitcher, and if you're a fat pitcher you're called "Buddha."
"Haven't seen Waynie since he got back from the Super Bowl - have
you?"
"Na," Buddha says again, with no more conviction than the first time.
"Well you know there's a reason - good reason. You heard what happened to him down there and what he had to do to get down there and all that, didn't you?"
"Na," Buddha says for the third time. Maybe he heard about Waynie and maybe he didn't, but right this minute he didn't.
"Okay, well, you know that the Packers went to the Super Bowl, right, everyone knows that, okay. Okay, but back when the Packers are just the winners of the division and they're going into their first playoff, it's Waynie saying, 'Tell you: If the Packers go to the Super Bowl I'm goin'. Don't care what it takes for me to get there, I'm goin.”
And we figure with Waynie it's probably just talk. Geez, I mean there's no doubt Waynie loves the Packers, loved 'em all his life, listened to the games, y'know, lived and died and talked this stuff until you want him to shut the hell up, but I don't know he's ever seen one, not in person, because when it comes to goin' anywhere Waynie's lucky if he's been to Bonduel.
"So it gets to be that first playoff game and the Packers win, right? The Packers win - you remember that. In the rain against San Francisco, with Desmond Howard returning that kick and everything. Waynie's here the whole time, not cheering much or swearing or anything, just smoking and drinking beers like he always does, and a time or two saying, 'If the Packers go to the Super Bowl I'm goin'. Not going to miss this. I'm goin',' and we're thinking it's just Waynie, 'cause you know Waynie likes to talk like that.
"Gets to be the first playoff game and the Packers win, and then it gets to be the second playoff game, the second playoff game, and you remember that one, Packers and Carolina, Packers just run over them and win. Same thing - Waynie down here at the bar, smoking, drinking beers, not even the look on his face changes, like he's playing poker with this football game and he's gonna win, dammit. He just says once or twice, 'Packers go to the Super Bowl I'm goin',' not even caring if we're paying attention or we believe him or anything. He's just saying it for himself, like he's trying to psych himself up or something, or maybe like he can't believe it.
"Maybe now this is turning into something serious after this game, because next night Waynie comes into the bar with a couple of sheets of paper and a staple gun, staples this ad right up on the wall, right into the paneling, with a staple gun. Geez, half-inch staples, too. God, you can guess how that made Kootch feel" - and now Boomer leans back over the bar and rolls his head back so that he's looking at Kootch upside down - "so how'd that make you feel, Kootch?"
Kootch doesn't stop tossing the night's broken glasses, says, "Pissed me off - shit, but it was just Waynie," and starts in on the bottles.
"The ad's for his snowmobile, and you know Waynie, doncha Buddha? I mean, Waynie worked for that snowmobile - really worked, not just worked the way Waynie usually picks at working. Made pallets, worked Hillshire -- on the killing floor, yet, with the cold and the blood, the one job around here you really don't want you got a choice - worked hard, made enough to buy that snowmobile so then he doesn't have to work so hard anymore. Way he figures it, you got a snowmobile and a little bit of money to spend, wood to throw on the fire there, what more you need? Know he paid seven thousand easy for that snowmobile, took damn good care of it and staples this ad to the wall saying he'll take twenty-five hundred for it."
"Guess he's serious then," says Buddha. He's surprised he said something so he takes another big gulp of the Budweiser.
"Guess he's serious then," Boomer says back. "Sled like that at that price in a bar like this goes fast, so Waynie has his twenty-five hundred. All he's needing is the ticket, and there's lots of places spring up to sell him a ticket.
"He actually get a ticket?"
"Yeah, he gets one. Real one, doesn't get taken like lots of these guys. Gets a seat on a plane going out. Doesn't know if he has a place to stay, but he's not too worried. Place to stay, that's not a big thing with Waynie. Never did find out when he landed on that one.
"Anyhow, he said he was goin' and he went. Give him all the credit in the world, guy who never traveled like that going all the way to New Orleans for the Super Bowl, first football game in person if you don't count Manawa, which you shouldn't. This ain't no Manawa game he's going to, not even homecoming. Hell, he must have been like a baby in a candy store, all they got down there, Bourbon Street. He says before he goes, 'They name a street after booze, shit, you know that's my kind of place.' Guess that doesn't explain everything happened down there, but maybe some."
"So what happened?", Buddha says. Kootch doesn't ask. He knows already.
"What happens is he gets down there on a Thursday and the game's on Friday and he's got a ticket to the Super Bowl and more than enough drinking money, even for New Orleans, not that he needs all of it, because soon as he gets down there he finds some old softball buddy from Big Falls and he's not buying drinks 'til Saturday at least. Waynie can take a lot, so that's not some small deal. He's soaking it all up, and I mean he's soaking up whatever he's seeing and whatever they're pouring. Wakes up Sunday knows he's got to straighten out a little, on account of the game being on Sunday and everything, so he gives it up through Sunday morning about 11, maybe about noon, until he thinks it's about time to head towards the stadium from wherever he was that morning, this softball buddy's camp trailer, maybe. Well, you go maybe three miles to the stadium, and every 50 feet there's another bunch of Packer fans parked in an alley or a parking lot grilling brats, drinking beers, shouting and hollering about how the Packers are going to kick the Patriots' asses. Wish you could hear him tell it, how Patriot fans are so goddamn serious walkin' to the stadium, and Packer fans are just lettin' 'er snap, like they never left Lambeau. God, Waynie's gone and died to Heaven - I mean, you know what I mean - when he sees like 20 blocks of tailgate party, and he's slapping high fives with everyone, and they give him beers and brats, and he takes the beers and downs 'em in a gulp, and the brats, he takes maybe a bite and then throws it in the trash can end of the block, where there's another beer and another brat. Waynie, he's never been much on solid food.
Trip to the stadium maybe takes 45 minutes, an hour if you walk there, it takes Waynie three hours. Gets in the stadium about 15 minutes before kickoff, finds his seat, grabs a beer in there, which you gotta do if you're at the Super Bowl, and besides, Waynie's got all his spending money for the week because everyone's been buying him drinks, grabs maybe one or two more, and it's second quarter and the Packers are having themselves a ball game. Now he starts getting into it, really trying to concentrate on watching it, and it happens."
Buddha's big, unmoving face stirs up a little. "What happens?"
"He passes out. Out cold. Says he can remember the Packers being behind and then the fireworks at the end of the game woke him up some, but then he went out again until postgame was just about over. Someone nudges him as they walk out and wake him up. Twenty-five hundred bucks to get down to New Orleans to watch a game he passes out at not even halfway through."
Buddha moves his head from side to side like a kid shaking a piggy bank. "He say it's worth it?"
"Hell yeah. He says he'd do it tomorrow. Says it's unforgettable, only he can't remember it. 'Screw the game,' he says. 'I got the goddamn game on videotape and I can watch it any damn time I please. But what I got down there they can't never put on videotape.' And I guess I can't argue with that.
"Funniest thing, though, is that when he's up here Waynie never could get anywhere with women. Did everything he could in this town to meet women: bowled twice a week, reffed volleyball, even was a greeter at Wal-Mart couple weeks. Shoulda seen that. And not that Waynie isn't good-looking or nice to women. He is, sorta, lot more than you'd think. Just never worked out up here for whatever reason. But he goes down there, passes out in the middle of the biggest football game in history, and when he wakes up and heads out of the place meets this lady from Menomonee Falls, takes him back to her motor home she drives down there specially for a game, gives him a ride all the way back up here, doesn't even use his plane ticket back and now he's down there, supposedly going to get a job managing these thirty rentals she's got. Just the job for Waynie: Drive around Milwaukee all day looking inside apartments. That's why you haven't seen Waynie. Waynie is gone."
"Goes to show what I always said about drinking: you gotta pick your spots," Buddha says, and he's thinking for the first time all night. Wait 'til next year, he's thinking. Then it'll be my turn.
It's unforgettable, only Waynie can't remember it
by Kit Kiefer
People who drive to Backtracks Bar say it's off the beaten path, which it is for those that drive. But the thing about it is to not drive to the place, and then it's not off the beaten path at all.
Backtracks is down County Trunk J to another county trunk, called CJ on account of it crossing C and J at different points on its way through,
and then down Five Mile Road to Woarstell Road, and there's no better way to get there with a car.
If you're on a snowmobile, now, that's another story. The main snowmobile trail between Stevens Point and Green Bay runs right past Backtracks, and it's at about a spot where if you're running from Waupaca to Shawano, or all the way from Point to Green Bay - not that that happens much, even when sleds go 60 and get away with it - you're likely to need a little bit of thirst-quenching or hand-warming, or a combination of the two. Backtracks is an old country bar that sticks around because of the snowmobile trade and a couple of horseshoe pits for the summertime crowd.
The thing with a bar like this in the summertime is you always know who you're going to find inside and in the wintertime you never know who you're going to find inside except for the guys you find inside in the summertime, too.
So in the wintertime at Backtracks you got the guys who curl up cozy in the corner, close to the restroom and the dart machine and far away from the door, and those that come stomping in with a big swirl of cold air and snowflakes behind them, looking like their heads are gonna brush the ceiling and shouting, 'cause they just got off their snowmobiles and took off their helmets and forgot they can hear now. All they want to do is get refreshed, play "Free Bird" on the jukebox, slam their shots of peppermint schnapps and then take off right away. Ships that pass in the night, they are. Sleds that pass in the night. No one fights or shouts between the two groups, but the year-'round crowd does stick to their own and talk about their own, no matter what roisterers in black jumpsuits are being boisterous at the other end.
This particular night was in February, just on the wintertime side of Valentine's Day, with about three or four weeks of midnight shouting and carrying on before they melt for the winter. Boomer, who is one of the most regular of regulars on account of owning the farm next door and supplying the land for the horseshoe pits, is at the bar working his way through a Miller Lite and fishing for things to talk about with Buddha, who's a good listener but not the best at starting conversations, especially when it's after midnight and he's been at the Budweiser for a couple hours.
"Seen Waynie at all tonight?", Boomer asks, though he knows very well that Buddha hasn't seen Waynie because Boomer hasn't seen Waynie, and Buddha gets around less than Boomer, if that's possible.
"Na," says Buddha. Buddha has a real name of Gary, but he gets this name because he's a softball pitcher in the summertime on account of he's fat and can't run but he can hit some, and if you're a fat and can hit some you're a pitcher, and if you're a fat pitcher you're called "Buddha."
"Haven't seen Waynie since he got back from the Super Bowl - have
you?"
"Na," Buddha says again, with no more conviction than the first time.
"Well you know there's a reason - good reason. You heard what happened to him down there and what he had to do to get down there and all that, didn't you?"
"Na," Buddha says for the third time. Maybe he heard about Waynie and maybe he didn't, but right this minute he didn't.
"Okay, well, you know that the Packers went to the Super Bowl, right, everyone knows that, okay. Okay, but back when the Packers are just the winners of the division and they're going into their first playoff, it's Waynie saying, 'Tell you: If the Packers go to the Super Bowl I'm goin'. Don't care what it takes for me to get there, I'm goin.”
And we figure with Waynie it's probably just talk. Geez, I mean there's no doubt Waynie loves the Packers, loved 'em all his life, listened to the games, y'know, lived and died and talked this stuff until you want him to shut the hell up, but I don't know he's ever seen one, not in person, because when it comes to goin' anywhere Waynie's lucky if he's been to Bonduel.
"So it gets to be that first playoff game and the Packers win, right? The Packers win - you remember that. In the rain against San Francisco, with Desmond Howard returning that kick and everything. Waynie's here the whole time, not cheering much or swearing or anything, just smoking and drinking beers like he always does, and a time or two saying, 'If the Packers go to the Super Bowl I'm goin'. Not going to miss this. I'm goin',' and we're thinking it's just Waynie, 'cause you know Waynie likes to talk like that.
"Gets to be the first playoff game and the Packers win, and then it gets to be the second playoff game, the second playoff game, and you remember that one, Packers and Carolina, Packers just run over them and win. Same thing - Waynie down here at the bar, smoking, drinking beers, not even the look on his face changes, like he's playing poker with this football game and he's gonna win, dammit. He just says once or twice, 'Packers go to the Super Bowl I'm goin',' not even caring if we're paying attention or we believe him or anything. He's just saying it for himself, like he's trying to psych himself up or something, or maybe like he can't believe it.
"Maybe now this is turning into something serious after this game, because next night Waynie comes into the bar with a couple of sheets of paper and a staple gun, staples this ad right up on the wall, right into the paneling, with a staple gun. Geez, half-inch staples, too. God, you can guess how that made Kootch feel" - and now Boomer leans back over the bar and rolls his head back so that he's looking at Kootch upside down - "so how'd that make you feel, Kootch?"
Kootch doesn't stop tossing the night's broken glasses, says, "Pissed me off - shit, but it was just Waynie," and starts in on the bottles.
"The ad's for his snowmobile, and you know Waynie, doncha Buddha? I mean, Waynie worked for that snowmobile - really worked, not just worked the way Waynie usually picks at working. Made pallets, worked Hillshire -- on the killing floor, yet, with the cold and the blood, the one job around here you really don't want you got a choice - worked hard, made enough to buy that snowmobile so then he doesn't have to work so hard anymore. Way he figures it, you got a snowmobile and a little bit of money to spend, wood to throw on the fire there, what more you need? Know he paid seven thousand easy for that snowmobile, took damn good care of it and staples this ad to the wall saying he'll take twenty-five hundred for it."
"Guess he's serious then," says Buddha. He's surprised he said something so he takes another big gulp of the Budweiser.
"Guess he's serious then," Boomer says back. "Sled like that at that price in a bar like this goes fast, so Waynie has his twenty-five hundred. All he's needing is the ticket, and there's lots of places spring up to sell him a ticket.
"He actually get a ticket?"
"Yeah, he gets one. Real one, doesn't get taken like lots of these guys. Gets a seat on a plane going out. Doesn't know if he has a place to stay, but he's not too worried. Place to stay, that's not a big thing with Waynie. Never did find out when he landed on that one.
"Anyhow, he said he was goin' and he went. Give him all the credit in the world, guy who never traveled like that going all the way to New Orleans for the Super Bowl, first football game in person if you don't count Manawa, which you shouldn't. This ain't no Manawa game he's going to, not even homecoming. Hell, he must have been like a baby in a candy store, all they got down there, Bourbon Street. He says before he goes, 'They name a street after booze, shit, you know that's my kind of place.' Guess that doesn't explain everything happened down there, but maybe some."
"So what happened?", Buddha says. Kootch doesn't ask. He knows already.
"What happens is he gets down there on a Thursday and the game's on Friday and he's got a ticket to the Super Bowl and more than enough drinking money, even for New Orleans, not that he needs all of it, because soon as he gets down there he finds some old softball buddy from Big Falls and he's not buying drinks 'til Saturday at least. Waynie can take a lot, so that's not some small deal. He's soaking it all up, and I mean he's soaking up whatever he's seeing and whatever they're pouring. Wakes up Sunday knows he's got to straighten out a little, on account of the game being on Sunday and everything, so he gives it up through Sunday morning about 11, maybe about noon, until he thinks it's about time to head towards the stadium from wherever he was that morning, this softball buddy's camp trailer, maybe. Well, you go maybe three miles to the stadium, and every 50 feet there's another bunch of Packer fans parked in an alley or a parking lot grilling brats, drinking beers, shouting and hollering about how the Packers are going to kick the Patriots' asses. Wish you could hear him tell it, how Patriot fans are so goddamn serious walkin' to the stadium, and Packer fans are just lettin' 'er snap, like they never left Lambeau. God, Waynie's gone and died to Heaven - I mean, you know what I mean - when he sees like 20 blocks of tailgate party, and he's slapping high fives with everyone, and they give him beers and brats, and he takes the beers and downs 'em in a gulp, and the brats, he takes maybe a bite and then throws it in the trash can end of the block, where there's another beer and another brat. Waynie, he's never been much on solid food.
Trip to the stadium maybe takes 45 minutes, an hour if you walk there, it takes Waynie three hours. Gets in the stadium about 15 minutes before kickoff, finds his seat, grabs a beer in there, which you gotta do if you're at the Super Bowl, and besides, Waynie's got all his spending money for the week because everyone's been buying him drinks, grabs maybe one or two more, and it's second quarter and the Packers are having themselves a ball game. Now he starts getting into it, really trying to concentrate on watching it, and it happens."
Buddha's big, unmoving face stirs up a little. "What happens?"
"He passes out. Out cold. Says he can remember the Packers being behind and then the fireworks at the end of the game woke him up some, but then he went out again until postgame was just about over. Someone nudges him as they walk out and wake him up. Twenty-five hundred bucks to get down to New Orleans to watch a game he passes out at not even halfway through."
Buddha moves his head from side to side like a kid shaking a piggy bank. "He say it's worth it?"
"Hell yeah. He says he'd do it tomorrow. Says it's unforgettable, only he can't remember it. 'Screw the game,' he says. 'I got the goddamn game on videotape and I can watch it any damn time I please. But what I got down there they can't never put on videotape.' And I guess I can't argue with that.
"Funniest thing, though, is that when he's up here Waynie never could get anywhere with women. Did everything he could in this town to meet women: bowled twice a week, reffed volleyball, even was a greeter at Wal-Mart couple weeks. Shoulda seen that. And not that Waynie isn't good-looking or nice to women. He is, sorta, lot more than you'd think. Just never worked out up here for whatever reason. But he goes down there, passes out in the middle of the biggest football game in history, and when he wakes up and heads out of the place meets this lady from Menomonee Falls, takes him back to her motor home she drives down there specially for a game, gives him a ride all the way back up here, doesn't even use his plane ticket back and now he's down there, supposedly going to get a job managing these thirty rentals she's got. Just the job for Waynie: Drive around Milwaukee all day looking inside apartments. That's why you haven't seen Waynie. Waynie is gone."
"Goes to show what I always said about drinking: you gotta pick your spots," Buddha says, and he's thinking for the first time all night. Wait 'til next year, he's thinking. Then it'll be my turn.
