With the American League Championship Series about to begin, I’m rooting for the Red Sox by publishing excerpts from the baseball-driven Chapter 12 of my novel, “Dirty Billy.” In this third installment, 12-year-old Mary Kay Thompson continues asking her city grampa ritual questions as they walk down Ponce de Leon Avenue toward the ballpark and an Atlanta Crackers game. See two previous posts to catch up.
“Why don’t you go to church?”
“I guess there’s nobody to make me go. And besides, if I ever went back to church, I’d be afraid they’d go on a Crusade.”
“What’s a Crusade?”
“A Crusade is when the church is going broke because people aren’t giving enough money, or maybe the preacher has just preached himself out and nobody’s coming to hear him sermonize, so the board of deacons gets together and declares war on a foreign country where people don’t believe in Jesus and need saving from their heathen ways.”
“What’s a heathen?”
“That’s somebody who’s ignorant of most everything, except the fact that when a snake with a triangular head bites you above the waist, you’ll most likely be on those roller skates by nightfall.”
He’d laugh and I’d laugh, not because I ever figured out what a Crusade was, but because the sun would be shining, I’d most likely have a dripping Hunky bar in my hand, and a Sunday suddenly felt a whole lot better. I’d run out of questions and he’d run out of answers about the time we reached the big Sears and Roebuck catalog building and crossed the street to the main gate of the ballpark. He always had tickets so close behind the Crackers dugout you could see the spit flying last season when our player-manager Gene Mauch bawled out one of his players or the home-plate umpire, which was usually five or six times a game, because our handsome manager had a hot temper. I figured someone was giving PaPa the seats because they were the same seats every time, and everybody knew he lived on his disability check and a fifty dollar a month pension from the firefighters.
The trade-off to sitting with PaPa Thompson was no beer. My city grandpa was an L.S.M.F.T. chain-smoker, but he was a lifelong teetotaler and took pains not to cuss in front of me. I fantasized he himself must have been a pretty good baseballer at one time because he knew how to egg on our pitchers and give opposing batters the rabbit ears: “Hum, baby, hum boy. Stick it in, strak ’im out. You the baby, you the boy,” or when we were at bat, “Ducks on the pond, ducks on the pond.” He also knew how to keep me in stitches with his stories about how Country Brown was so fast he used to play center field sitting down under the big magnolia tree that still stood there (true). Or the time when A. J. Hudson, the weird old burglar-bootlegger from our neighborhood, came to the park and stayed right there in the next seat through a fifteen-inning game (true). How an old Cuban witch-woman down in Tampa taught him how to pronounce pon-THEY day LEE ON in Spanish (untrue about the teacher, but the right way to say it). Or how Whitlow Wyatt, who was managing the Crackers this year, once called him at home one morning before a game and asked him if he should pitch Ted Abernathy on just two days rest (false; Ted Abernathy submarined for the Fort McPherson Third Army team for a while, but any half-wit knew he never in his life put on a Crackers uniform). (To be concluded tomorrow)
With the American League Championship Series about to begin, I’m rooting for the Red Sox by publishing excerpts from the baseball-driven Chapter 12 of my novel, “Dirty Billy.” In this third installment, 12-year-old Mary Kay Thompson continues asking her city grampa ritual questions as they walk down Ponce de Leon Avenue toward the ballpark and an Atlanta Crackers game. See two previous posts to catch up.
“Why don’t you go to church?”
“I guess there’s nobody to make me go. And besides, if I ever went back to church, I’d be afraid they’d go on a Crusade.”
“What’s a Crusade?”
“A Crusade is when the church is going broke because people aren’t giving enough money, or maybe the preacher has just preached himself out and nobody’s coming to hear him sermonize, so the board of deacons gets together and declares war on a foreign country where people don’t believe in Jesus and need saving from their heathen ways.”
“What’s a heathen?”
“That’s somebody who’s ignorant of most everything, except the fact that when a snake with a triangular head bites you above the waist, you’ll most likely be on those roller skates by nightfall.”
He’d laugh and I’d laugh, not because I ever figured out what a Crusade was, but because the sun would be shining, I’d most likely have a dripping Hunky bar in my hand, and a Sunday suddenly felt a whole lot better. I’d run out of questions and he’d run out of answers about the time we reached the big Sears and Roebuck catalog building and crossed the street to the main gate of the ballpark. He always had tickets so close behind the Crackers dugout you could see the spit flying last season when our player-manager Gene Mauch bawled out one of his players or the home-plate umpire, which was usually five or six times a game, because our handsome manager had a hot temper. I figured someone was giving PaPa the seats because they were the same seats every time, and everybody knew he lived on his disability check and a fifty dollar a month pension from the firefighters.
The trade-off to sitting with PaPa Thompson was no beer. My city grandpa was an L.S.M.F.T. chain-smoker, but he was a lifelong teetotaler and took pains not to cuss in front of me. I fantasized he himself must have been a pretty good baseballer at one time because he knew how to egg on our pitchers and give opposing batters the rabbit ears: “Hum, baby, hum boy. Stick it in, strak ’im out. You the baby, you the boy,” or when we were at bat, “Ducks on the pond, ducks on the pond.” He also knew how to keep me in stitches with his stories about how Country Brown was so fast he used to play center field sitting down under the big magnolia tree that still stood there (true). Or the time when A. J. Hudson, the weird old burglar-bootlegger from our neighborhood, came to the park and stayed right there in the next seat through a fifteen-inning game (true). How an old Cuban witch-woman down in Tampa taught him how to pronounce pon-THEY day LEE ON in Spanish (untrue about the teacher, but the right way to say it). Or how Whitlow Wyatt, who was managing the Crackers this year, once called him at home one morning before a game and asked him if he should pitch Ted Abernathy on just two days rest (false; Ted Abernathy submarined for the Fort McPherson Third Army team for a while, but any half-wit knew he never in his life put on a Crackers uniform). (To be concluded tomorrow)