Post #2 my baseball novel (399 hits)
Category: SportsRating: 0 on 2 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by rcchristi (View user info) at 2004-11-13 02:42:25 EST
Chapter I, concluded, baseball novel. Post #2 870 words. Premise: I am a baseball writer living near Wrigley Field. This chapter concerns a telephone interview after midnight with Chipper Jones. The entire book as planned deals with baseball stories I have already written for the local baseball paper, but this work is intended as a book as opposed to a collection of said stories. So my work in the novel has already been planned. 870 words follow:
"What side of the plate is your natural side, and which side did you have to learn?" I asked. With my luck he'll just say he's ambidextrous, or given his presumed intoxicated condition at 3am in an East Coast bar, he'll die trying to say 'ambidextrous.'
"She's fucking around with Tom Glavine!" Chipper yelled. Or he could disregard the question altogether. If he was going to rant, I wanted to sit down instead of sit up. I got out of bed and walked into the kitchen and rotated the dial on the wall to illuminate the room by precise increments of light until the maximum effect was reached. My complicated tape recording equipment is set up next to my landline on the table. It's a Lanier micro cassette recorder that I brought home with me as my parting gift from the world of Insurance. I'm sure no one there misses it.
"She knows way too much about Tom Glavine!" Chipper explained. I removed the landline from its cradle and placed it such that the earpiece was adjacent to the tape recorder microphone, or, micro-microphone.
"Chipper, I just want to ask your permission to record this interview. Is that OK?" I learned to ask this important question as a workers compensation claims examiner. Without it, not only am I doing something illegal, but also the entire recording is inadmissible in court. Meanwhile, I'm positioned like someone sentenced in court to the executioner for a beheading, because my chin is touching the kitchen table so I can address both the mouthpiece of the landline and the micro-microphone of the tape recorder.
"I don't care," he said. "Look, I wouldn't tell this to the papers or anyone I know, because all I have is complaints and they'd love to hear it just so they could say, 'told you so, that's what you get for leaving your wife and hooking up with a Hooter's waitress.' That's not even a story anymore anyway."
I raised my head off the table, staying my execution but wondering if Chipper Jones was going to put his own foot into his mouth anytime soon. I wasn't going to interrupt at this point. The Glavine angle was a new one on me. Glavine and Chipper were teammates on the Braves for years until Glavine joined the Mets after the 2002 season.
"I have a tough job," Chipper said. "I need a supporting woman when I come home from a road trip. Instead, she describes the ceiling in Tom Glavine's hideaway in Buckhead. I want to relate to her and I want her to be there for me because I depend on her to put things in perspective for me after a bad game or a difficult trip. I don't want to hear her say Tom Glavine had an idyllic childhood in Massachusetts. And why does she know that Tom Glavine's favorite food is the Hooter's Cuban Sandwich, which is a toasty "stogie" roll filled with layers of pork loin, ham, pickles and spicy mustard?"
Chipper had to excuse himself and put his cell phone on the men's room sink so he could comb his hair before going back upstairs to the dance floor. I wondered how late the Tongue & Groove is open. It must be one of those places that close at 4am. Didn't the Braves have a home game tonight? I logged onto MLB.com and found the score: the Braves lost 8-1. If this is how Chipper celebrates a bad loss, what does he do when the Braves win? Fly to New York and party with Derek Jeter?
"How does she know that Tom Glavine was scratched from a Saturday start against the Yankees recently after over-throwing in his warm-up sessions during a rain delay at Shea?" Chipper resumed with another rhetorical question. "Or that the Mets secretly gave Tom a day off a couple of days later and he spent it driving upstate to Cooperstown, playfully roaming around the bases at Doubleday Field, traveling about Lake Otsego in a pedal-powered boat built for two, and picnicking in a gazebo?"
I put my chin back down on the table. The governor called. He said my execution is back on. I had no answers for Chipper, but I suggested that instead of going back upstairs to dance, he should go home and talk to his wife. He thought that was a good idea and he promised to do that. "And she better be home," Chipper said. "It's about 3 o'clock in the morning on a Wednesday, so there's no excuse for her not to be at home waiting up for me."
The phone call concluded, I placed the landline back in its cradle and turned off the tape recorder. While still seated, I watched the light disappear at a slow speed equivalent to my fingers turning the dial on the wall. Beyond the kitchen windows no more than three blocks to the northeast, I saw the top of Wrigley Field over the roofs of the three-story condos across Racine Avenue. If I'm going to make Wrigleyville the current stomping ground of my patchwork quilt of a life, I might as well fancy myself a baseball writer while I'm here.
User Reviews
Submitted by AwesomeJohnson (user info) at 2004-11-13 09:44:28 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
i hate chipper jones. anything the mets can do to stick it to him is a +201010291263 in my book. oh, and some of your details were a little overdone, especially the part about turning the lights on. good story though.
Submitted by I_Have_a_Kristen_Fetish (user info) at 2004-11-13 06:22:11 EST (#)
Ranking: -2
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