To Hell And Back

Yesterday I took my son to New York for our annual Yankee game. It's 150 miles from our house to the stadium, door-to-door. Roughly. I know I pushed the odometer back to zero fairly soon after leaving. At any rate, its a three hour ride. So we left three and a half hours prior to the game. And we were taking the train, so we only had to go to New Haven, hop aboard Metro-North, and cruise in comfort to 125th street, where we would catch the Subway and spend fifteen minutes or so packed like lemmings into a shiny metal box that smells sort of like a used urinal cake.

Except that the parking lot was full at the train station. And by the time we found another spot and cruised into the station the train we needed had departed by three minutes. And the next one wouldn't leave for an hour and we would miss at least half an hour of the game.

So being the man of action, and little forethought, that I am, I decide we'll drive into the Bronx. As we cruised along the Hutchinson Parkway, making great time, (OK, I may have violated some traffic rules having to do with speed), we were looking at getting to the game in time to maybe see some batting practice. And then we turned onto whatever highway it is, (the Cross Bronx, I think), that gets you to the Major Deegan, which gets you to the Stadium. And unfortunately, in addition to the Major Deegan, also gets you to the George Washington Bridge. Which, judging from the traffic jam we encountered, had apparently fallen into the Harlem River. We simply stopped moving. Eventually we crawled forward. And stopped. And crawled forward. And stopped. And crawled forward. And stopped. And suddenly swerved into another lane, cut off an 18-wheeler, shot forward three car lengths, and stopped. And crawled forward. And so on and so forth. For a fucking hour. Finally, just as I was starting to hallucinate that the Virgin Mother was beckoning me to drive myself and my first-born into the Harlem River, I saw the Major Deegan exit. I broke sixteen different traffic regulations cutting over three lanes in 15', hit the ramp at 60 and headed to the left of three poorly-marked options.

It was the wrong option.

So I drove through Harlem, keeping the Stadium, now separated from us by the Harlem River and the Virgin Mother, who was floating over said river doing a crossword puzzle and saying "Hey, don't look at me. I told you hit the water. You'd be at the Stadium now if you listened to me."

Eventually, I found another bridge and rocketed across it, straight into another traffic jam caused by everyone in the tri-state area, and three buses from Maryland, trying to find a place to park. By now I'm at my wit's end and the game has started, so I agree to pay $28 for valet parking just to get into the game before the 7th inning stretch.

Our seats sucked. They were in the top section, but at the bottom. To get to them one comes out of a ramp into the middle of the section, and then one has to complete a technical climb down to the seats. We were seated just close enough to the edge that a metal bar, which might give someone plunging over the edge false reason to hope, but no chance of survival, blocked our view of some unimportant parts of the field, like the plate and the pitcher's mound. So we moved our seats up a few rows where we sat in the sun and broiled for four hours, during the third of which the Virgin Mother again appeared, but this time with lemonade. There's a chance I may have been suffering heat stress, and since beer was $8.00 for Coors, I had resorted to recycling my own urine by then, so hallucinations were to be expected. Good lemonade though.

For most of the games the Yankees couldn't hit a curve-ball with an ironing board, (Quoting Steve Garvey describing Michael Jordan's chances for success at pro baseball), and they trailed 3-0 going into the 9th inning. But lo, hope springs eternal, and the Yankees put two men on base before Jorge Posada struck out swinging at a pitch that was both high and outside, thereby eliminating the chance to load the bases and creating two outs. A kid, (he's 28), named Shelley strode to the plate. Shelley Duncan. Big kid. Doesn't look like much in the thinking department. Hits a lot of home-runs. Also hits the air a lot as the ball zips past him. I'm yelling at him to hit a home-run for Christ's sake because I didn't turn my son into a sun-stroked vegetable on the Cross Bronx Expressway to see the Yanks get shut-out by the fucking Orioles. "Watch your mouth" said the Virgin Mother. "Blow it out your ass" I replied. "You don't like cussing, go buy a luxury box". As she was standing up to punch me, Duncan swung. We paused, hardly daring to hope, as the ball soard towards left field. Would it go foul? Would it stay fair?

It stayed fair, and my son, the apple of my eye, the whiskey in my liver, screamed with joy and wonder as his team came back from seemingly insurmountable odds to dramatically win the game. Or at least tie it. But surely after that they'd win it right?

Wrong. Because a man named Joe Torre hates little kids. To start the next inning Joe Torre, the "manager" of the Yankees, elected to put in Mariano Rivera, the Yankees vaunted, and aging-like-the-portrait-of-Dorian-Gray, closer. The guy who saves games. Not the guy who starts an inning with the score tied. And especially not the guy who starts such an inning when he's pitched in 3 of the last 4 games and in the last two of those got hit harder than a pinata at a Mexican meth addicts birthday party.

"Holy fucking Christ" said the Virgin Mother. "What the fuck is Torre doing? Doesn't he know that he has Joba Chamberlain in the bullpen. The kid with the rocket arm who hasn't pitched in a day? The kid no one in the majors has hit yet? What the fuck is the matter with him?" "Watch your mouth" I said, "there are kids around." To which she replied "Well then I hope they've got more fucking sense than Torre does, cuz he's about to piss this game away", and then disappeared into a taco shell. I took a sip of the lemonade, Rivera gave up two doubles and a home run, Torre never moved off the bench, and the Yankees lost.

The ride home took four hours. I'll spare you the details, but just know that if you ever need a honky to get you out of Harlem in 3 minutes, I'm your man.

Despite all this, I would go back again today just to see the look on my kid's face when Duncan hit that home run. And because I'm pretty sure the Virgin Mother took my wallet.

But next time? We're taking the fucking train.