Uncle Jumbo's Playground

–Illustration by James Dankert

The things a guy will do for a free burrito. It’s humiliating, but a deal’s a deal, even when it’s not much of a deal. A couple weeks ago I insisted I wouldn’t write a damn word until the Twins clawed their way to .500. When it became apparent that that wasn’t likely to happen anytime in the next, oh, four months, I said that I’d cough something up when they managed to sweep a series.

So now, since Zeller seems to have entirely lost interest in the greatest game ever invented, a game that he can never forgive for being so difficult for him to master and so damn easy for a fat guy like me, I guess I’ll finally step into the breach.

I’ll say this much for myself: I can fill a breach like nobody’s business. And at a time when my weight, thirst for cheap beer, penchant for public urination, and economic status (such as it is) should have driven me into the greasy and indiscriminate arms of NASCAR Nation, I’m still a baseball fan. And I’m still a Twins fan, even though there are increasingly days when I curse the team with every labored breath left in my lungs.

I don’t understand how a team can play like a bunch of slow-pitch softball hogs one day, and like a World Cup soccer team with a sieve for a goaltender the next. It makes no sense to me, and it drives me into raging fits of bellowing public (and private) spectacle. If you want to really ruin your Memorial Day picnic, go ahead and try to imagine Jumbo alone in his sweltering attic apartment in his ample white Jockey shorts, stomping around and howling and looking sort of like a red, sweating sausage that’s spent too much time on the hot dog spinner at the SuperAmerica and is just about ready to explode.

There you have it. Welcome to my sad little world. The people who live below me spend a good deal of time banging on the ceiling with what sounds like a broomstick.

To make things even worse, my old friend Junie “Boneyard” Sandoval was crashing with me for a couple months after his battleaxe of a wife threw him out of their place in Fridley. He was in a bad way, but I was none too happy to have him in my private space, of which I occupy plenty all by my lonesome. It was hard to watch baseball games when my house guest insisted on listening to the Steve Miller Band’s Greatest Hits over and over at maximum volume. I also don’t like to watch anybody play air guitar, particularly another fat guy without a shirt on. I’ve known Junie since grade school, but I discovered that that’s unfortunately not a good enough excuse to still be friends with anybody more than thirty years down the road. I realized that we had absolutely nothing in common other than that we were both thrilled to see Dennys Reyes, a guy almost as fat as either of us, pitching in the Major Leagues, and we both shopped at the Big and Tall Men’s clothing store. Neither of us is what you would call tall, but I suppose we fit pretty much any reasonable definition of big.

Things finally came to a head –or, rather, to blows– when I walked into my apartment the other night and found Junie wearing my clothes, eating my Captain Crunch with my spoon, out of my plastic ice cream pail. I also discovered that he’d apparently spent the day drinking his way through the last of my chocolate milk and beer. I always have plenty of beer on hand, which would explain Junie’s extreme state of inebriation.

I kicked his drunk ass out of my apartment and sat down for the first time in weeks to watch a baseball game in peace. I was pretty uptight and regrettably stone-cold sober, but the Twins lit up Milwaukee for sixteen runs (and coughed up ten: the softball hogs and the sieve goaltender were in the house). It was a beautiful night, my apartment hadn’t yet been transformed into an inferno, and I was mercifully reminded that I’m still capable of experiencing something approaching serenity on an occasional basis.

The Twins are 6-2 since I sent Junie packing, and though I’m sure as hell not stupid enough to get truly excited by that fact, I still have to admit that the basic math of the the last week would have me breathing a little bit easier if it wasn’t a hundred degrees in my apartment, if I wasn’t in such lousy shape, and if I was, in fact, actually capable of breathing a little bit easier. Which –tough luck for me, I suppose– I’m unfortunately not.