Uncle Jumbo's Playground

–Illustration by James Dankert

People have been wondering what happened to Uncle Jumbo. That is, of course, the million dollar question, and a question whose answer apparently lies somewhere far in the man’s distant past.

All I can tell you is that something did indeed happen. There’s no doubt about that. And something always seems to be happening to Jumbo. One consistent thing that happens is that he disappears for long periods of time. It would be hard, you might think, for such a large object to disappear so completely from the radar, but he nonetheless has a knack for doing just that.

I’ve always liked to think of these disappearances as sulking retreats. I can also generally assume, I’ve learned, that he’s pissed about some imagined slight. Other friends have diagnosed him as suffering from depression, social anxiety, or kidney failure. I believe it’s nothing more complicated than pure misanthropy.

Jumbo’s always been a pain in the ass, but in his younger, presumably happier days this quality could often be both endearing and entertaining. Not so in recent years, I’m afraid. Back when we were both younger he used to routinely fret about the day when there would no longer be a single Major League player who was older than he was. That, Jumbo always claimed, would be a form of death, and the end of his days as a fan.

Despite the existence of Julio Franco on a Major League roster, I’m almost certain that long-feared nightmare is now staring Jumbo in the face, and I stopped hearing from him about two-thirds of the way through last season. For various reasons (mainly because he’s such a pain in the ass) I also stopped trying to initiate contact with him.

Before his disappearing act last year I was engaged in almost constant wrangling with Jumbo over the terms of what he insisted on calling our “contract,” which was never really anything but the vaguest of arrangements. He insisted that we needed to renegotiate, and made what were increasingly ridiculous and wholly unreasonable demands.

Jumbo wanted a company car, for instance. It’s true that I do have access to what is technically a company car –a 1986 Chevette with 149,000 miles on an odometer that hasn’t worked in two years– but I share the piece of shit with Brian Sandberg, another member of the Rake’s brain trust, and I seldom get to actually drive the thing.

Jumbo also spent months bitching about the computer that was provided him –free of charge, I should mention– by Rake management. He claimed that the computer was a prehistoric Radio Shack PC, the Tandy 2000, and that it was full of bugs and cluttered with advertising spread sheets from the late-eighties. That was nonsense, of course. The machine was actually an IBM 5150, an older but perfectly serviceable computer.

In apparent protest Jumbo began typing his columns on a manual typewriter and faxing them to the Rake’s offices from a Mail Boxes Etc. outlet in St. Louis Park (“Real Men Work Manual,” was always scrawled on the cover sheet). These documents –consisting as they did of pages of single-spaced text with scads of hand-written corrections and digressions– were virtually, if not entirely, illegible, and a decision was made (not, I must admit, by me) that we wouldn’t post them.

I still have some of these columns on my desk, and many of them have absolutely nothing to do with baseball. In one of them –“The Kiosk King”– Jumbo writes of his attempt to work at every kiosk at the Mall of America. He recalls being fired from a calendar kiosk for barfing into a plastic bag and getting hired less than an hour later at a kiosk that sold (or so he claimed) nothing but rocks.

He also submitted a column in which he recounted in horrible detail his colonoscopy, and claimed that his older brother, Rich, had been “Born Again, no less than eight times.”

I tried for a time to reason with Jumbo, and to steer him back to the topic of baseball. The final straw, I suppose, was when he submitted a fantasy in which he was driving a lawn tractor and dragging a naked John Gordon around the infield of his old high school stadium in Blooming Void. This spectacle, if I’m not mistaken, was supposed to be some sort of fundraiser for kids with disabilities.

When I refused to post that column Jumbo disappeared on me, and the entire baseball season proceeded to go straight in the toilet.

As much as he has tried my patience, and as difficult as he can be, I have to admit that I miss Jumbo. I started trying to get back in contact with him in March, and managed to eventually track him down through his mother. When I finally talked to him he sounded under the weather, said he had severed all ties with the Rake, was working happily at Cracker Barrel, and directed any further inquiries to “his lawyer.”

I told him to call me if he changed his mind, and I came into the office on Monday and discovered that he had left a message on my machine at three o’clock Sunday morning. He was, he said, ready to “talk turkey,” and requested a meeting with the publisher and the Rake’s team of attorneys.

Such a meeting proving impossible, Jumbo settled for a brief phone conversation with Domenic Cossi, the Rake’s manager of New Business Development. As a result of this abbreviated negotiation, I am told, Jumbo has agreed to make “the occasional contribution” to this space in exchange for “an undisclosed amount of credit at Chipotle, a Da Vinci Code coffee mug, and a copy of Rudy Perpich: The People’s Governor, warmly and personally inscribed by Deputy Editor Julie Caniglia.”

I’m told that I might expect Jumbo’s first contribution by as early as Friday, but I’m not holding my breath.