Look, there’s not a bigger Tom Brunansky fan in all of Twins Territory, but this team’s in trouble and in dire need of some pop in the middle infield.
So, as much as it pains me to say this, I think it might be time for Andy MacPhail to pull the trigger on that long-rumored Bruno for Tommy Herr trade. Herr could be just the guy to light a fire under this ballclub.
Also, bad news, I’m afraid, for the lonely bachelors out there: Baseball knowledge will not help you pick up girls.
Early on the afternoon of the Northern League exhibition season opener, Midway Stadium is bustling with activity. The Rolling Stones are blasting from the public address speakers, and players are already stretching and running in the outfield grass. Underneath the grandstand, in the cramped bunker that serves as the offices of the St. Paul Saints, the phone is ringing off the hook and the atmosphere is one of jovial chaos. The Saints command center is decidedly short on the streamlined ambience and formal atmosphere of most offices. It looks, in fact, like it could be the reception area of a thriving small-town automotive garage.
Mike Veeck has commandeered someone else’s spartan office, and is looking uncomfortable perched behind a desk. The ringmaster most often associated with the unlikely and phenomenal success of the Saints, he’s clearly a guy who likes to be in motion. Even sitting down, he never quite manages to sit still. Veeck’s a fidget, with the wild eyes of a man who has a lot going on in his head. In fact, he is ridiculously busy these days. He’s promoting his new book—Fun is Good: How to Create Joy and Passion in Your Workplace and Career (Rodale Press)—and has a full slate of speaking engagements. And then there are the six minor league baseball teams he operates and owns (along with such high-profile partners as Bill Murray and Jimmy Buffett).
Right now, Veeck is in the middle of writing a giant pile of thank-you notes, by hand, to every Saints season-ticket holder, and conversing with a visitor, while people keep wandering in and out of the tiny space—some simply to say hello and others to check on some detail related to the upcoming season. One guy comes in to look for a VCR that has apparently vanished. A question blurts from the office’s intercom: “Who recorded the song ‘Bus Stop’?” Veeck pauses mid-sentence to answer (the Hollies), then picks up the conversation right where he left off.
Thirteen years ago, Veeck moved to St. Paul to help launch the Saints in the fledgling Northern League, a confederation of professional teams that intended to operate outside the umbrella of Major League Baseball. At the time he was in a gambling frame of mind (actually, he’s always in a gambling frame of mind). He had recently given up an advertising career to help resurrect a floundering minor league franchise in Florida. That stint with the Miami Miracle followed more than a decade in exile from professional baseball, after he was essentially blackballed following his role—okay, it was his idea—in the now-legendary Disco Demolition promotion at Comiskey Park in 1979. That stunt, which involved blowing up thousands of disco records between games of a White Sox doubleheader, resulted in damage to the field, a near riot, and Chicago’s forfeiture of the nightcap. Collateral damage notwithstanding, the episode was a classic Veeck production. The games were sold out, and it was estimated that tens of thousands of fans were turned away.
Veeck, of course, has a first-class baseball pedigree. His grandfather was a Chicago sportswriter who became president of the Cubs back in 1917. He was the man who had the idea to grow ivy on the walls of Wrigley Field. Bill Veeck, Mike’s dad, was one of the most colorful and innovative entrepreneurs in baseball history, and is in the Hall of Fame. At various times in his life, he owned and operated major league franchises in Cleveland, St. Louis, and Chicago, where he pioneered all manner of ballpark promotions and amenities. Most famous for once sending three-foot-seven, sixty-five-pound Eddie Gaedel to the plate for an at-bat with the Browns (he walked on four pitches), Bill Veeck also introduced the exploding scoreboard at Comiskey Park and was the first owner to put player names on the backs of jerseys. He loved mingling (and drinking) with the fans, never had an unlisted number, answered his own phone, and had a wooden leg with a built-in ashtray. Mike Veeck is an apple that didn’t fall far from the tree (he wrote Fun is Good while recuperating from a broken leg sustained, he said, while “playing basketball on my bike”), but he was a late bloomer. When he accepted investor Marv Goldklang’s offer to run the Saints, he was moving into his forties and had a wife and two kids (including a son named Night Train). He was strapped, and maybe more than a little desperate.
“I bet every nickel I had on this thing, and I was scared to death,” Veeck said. “Everybody thought we were nuts.”
Veeck’s original marketing plan for the Saints consisted of exactly three words: “Fun is good.” Everything else followed. “We wanted to run a ball club with people who didn’t have preconceived notions about how things work,” he said. “We wanted to foster an environment where people loved to come to work, and where they were appreciated for what they did. And we were going to put all of our energy and attention into creating an atmosphere that ensured that when fans came out to the ballpark, they had a good time and went home happy. Is that simplistic? You bet. But I don’t think you’ll find that attitude in a lot of companies.”
That simple philosophy—and a constant string of unpredictable and sometimes insane promotions—have turned Veeck’s and the Goldklang Group’s initial investment into a collection of minor league teams with an estimated combined value of thirty million dollars.
Veeck’s book argues that humor can be an asset in any company. “You can’t force or fake this stuff,” he said. “And I know that corporate America has never been tremendously receptive to this sort of philosophy. They do, though, always have an interest in anything that works. It’s a competitive world, and now more than ever there’s a direct correlation between the attention people receive and their satisfaction with an experience. That’s as true of employees as it is of customers. A lot of people, from the top on down, are starting to realize there are going to have to be some changes.” —Brad Zellar
Okay, honest to God, that’s just about enough of this nonsense. I believe we’ve reached the point where the bump in the road has officially turned into a rut, and it’s damn hard to explain what’s happening to this team right now.
This is one of those times where you could point your finger in just about any direction in the Minnesota clubhouse and you’d be looking at somebody deserving of a share of the blame for this stretch of sustained wretchedness. It’s especially painful to be reminded of what a miserable game and utter waste of time baseball can be.
Under the happiest of circumstances baseball requires a ridiculous time commitment from the serious fan –a game like tonight’s, for instance: let’s say you got down to the Dome at five o’clock for the virtuous Admission Possible picnic; then you sat through nine excruciating innings in which the Twins managed just five hits and two runs against Detroit’s Jeremy Bonderman, and Kyle Lohse got the snot knocked out of him by the Tigers.
It was an ugly game all around, a well-rounded exercise in futility, yet dispatched in a mercifully brief two hours and thirty-eight minutes. Still, that’s almost five hours carved out of your life right there. By the time you got to your car, negotiated your way out of downtown, and got home it was probably 10:30. Presumably you worked today as well, and it was a weeknight.
If you’re a serious fan, though, you likely tuned into Baseball Tonight or checked out the internet when you got home to see how the White Sox did (they won again, of course, behind another splendid performance from Jon Garland, stretching their lead in the Central to a truly dispiriting nine games).
So: You just buried seven or eight hours of your day in a hole in the ground; you’ll never get a single minute of any of those hours back, and, with the exception of the pleasant and inspiring prelude of the Admission Possible event, you don’t have a single fond memory to show for your evening.
You can’t even begin to imagine how exhausting this sort of thing must be for the players, who got to the ballpark hours before you did and had to drive home through deserted streets long after you departed. You’d think, though, that it must be very exhausting.
And you certainly hope they’re as tired of it as you are.
This guy comes in and says to me, “What’s your goal here? What’s the big idea?” He was a huge man, seriously overweight and clearly laboring to balance there before me at the counter. Moist, wheezing, one of these characters who’s always swiping at his forehead with a handkerchief, and something of a throwback, I suppose, in this regard.
I took a quick glance at his shoes. Perhaps, actually, a glance is always quick, but I’ve made a long study of the shoes of huge men, and I’ve noticed that they’re always strangely worn. This particular fellow had worn down a good half-inch on the inside sole of each of his shoes. The man was possibly pigeon-toed, I thought, or perhaps the damage to his footwear was simply the inevitable result of bearing the weight of such a resolute human glacier.
I knew instantly that I didn’t like the tone of this fellow’s voice, and frankly wasn’t much interested in whatever it was that he might have to say. I didn’t like the cut of his jib. There was a compensatory rudeness that one often finds in the very unhappy or the excessively overweight. I am well aware, believe me, of the bigotry implicit in my attitudes toward the very large, and it is people like this character who are largely responsible for it. It seemed like I was always having to deal with them.
The man swung one of his big arms up on the counter. It sounded like someone had dropped a fat, metropolitan phonebook. He commenced to drumming with his thumb, in the process blowing a wet wheeze in my direction, a wheeze that carried with it across the counter the stale smell of what I thought might have been chocolate milk. I noticed with a combination of fascination and disgust the film of sweat his arm had deposited on the counter top.
He began to reiterate. Guys like this, I’ve learned, are masters at reiteration, generally of the inexplicable.
“I would just like for someone to explain to me what it is you people think you’re trying to accomplish here,” he said. “That’s all I’m asking.”
“I’m sorry” I said. “But you’re asking entirely too much.”
–Illustration by James Dankert
Sunday night –the worst handful of hours in the week– finds me a complete wreck, hoarse, hungover, and ruined by a weekend of stale air and even worse baseball. It doesn’t help matters that my attic apartment is so damn hot that I’ve spent the entire evening sprawled on the floor in my underwear in front of the fan, chasing giant Gary Gaetti souvenir cups full of grape Kool-Aid with Tylenol PM and cans of lukewarm Milwaukee’s Best.
There’s a cat that I inherited when I rented the apartment, and every time the thing creeps near me I have to summon enough energy to bellow and lash out at the creature lest it try to straddle me and lick the sweat from my chest. I’m not cruel enough to throw the cat out into the street or dump it at a shelter, but neither am I enough of a pervert to take any pleasure or consolation from its caresses.
Perhaps, actually, I am perverse enough to take pleasure from its caresses, which is why I am so vigiliant about keeping the animal at bay. I recognize what a slippery slope that could be, but lord knows, at the moment I am a man who is sorely in need of consolation.
Sundays are good for something, at least, and I thank God I don’t have to worry about turning on the radio and hearing the voice of Mike Max, or I’d gouge out my eyes with a soup spoon. Tonight I have no intention of turning on the radio or television, period. I don’t even want to hear a score from the White Sox game.
What I’d really like to do, if I could summon the energy, is horsewhip the entire raggedy-ass crew of imposters that seems to have taken over the Twins clubhouse. I’d like to lash the bastards within an inch of their lives for the pain they’ve inflicted on me in the last week.
Did you ever notice that the Twins seem to climb aboard the crap wagon every year about the time the NBA playoffs comes along? Or maybe it’s just the finals; I’ll have to look. But to me that’s the sign of a team that doesn’t have any focus. There are, of course, a whole lot of signs that this is a team that doesn’t have any focus.
Right now they’re just dicking around, and they look simultaneously desperate and lazy. Ask any reasonably competent psychologist (not that I know any): there’s nothing more dangerous than someone who’s desperate and lazy, other than someone who’s drunk, desperate, and lazy. Take it from someone who knows, and who’s paid a terrible price for that knowledge.
Maybe I’m overreacting, and should try to sleep off the weekend before making this pronouncement, but this is the closest this team’s been to total ruination since the miserable slide late in the 2001 season. Someone should check the handwriting on the line-up card Ron Gardenhire posted today, in fact, because I’d swear it had Tom Kelly’s fingerprints all over it. That was a line-up from 1999, for God’s sake.
Yeah, great, let’s move Cuddyer back over to second, push Rivas to short, and toss the Australian out at third in hopes of at the very least dredging up some sort of feel-good storyline. This guy –whatever his name is– is Dan Masteller with an Aussie accent. This is all a terrible joke, and all those promising young players we were gargling like hyenas about at the beginning of the season are either back spinning their wheels in Rochester or doing absolutely nothing to justify the hype. This team couldn’t hit Wayne Terwilliger right now, the pitching is a shambles, and half the roster has some sort of strain.
Tell me this: what the hell is a strain? A pull, a tear, a fracture, those are all something, but a strain? A strain is the whiny second cousin of a cramp, and neither of them is anything more than an aggravation. Believe me, I’m feeling severely strained at the moment, but I’ll be good and damned if anybody’s going to allow me to use that as an excuse to take the day off tomorrow.
This team better shake the shit out of its shorts in a hurry, because, I swear, it’s not too late for me to take up a real hobby. I’ll even take up fishing before I sit through too much more of this nonsense.
–Senior Citizen Center. Livingston, Montana
Ella was on the front porch, blowing into an empty bottle with a straw, shivering a fly that was trapped there at the bottom. The fly was woozy and slick with cola, and was rolling and tumbling in the little bottle hurricane that Ella was producing with her straw. The fly was done for, Ella knew that much. It had gotten itself into a pickle, and would spend its last moments at the bottom of the bottle, drunk on cola and flopping itself unconscious.
Roland Schramm came around the side of the house with a globe in his arms and crawled down under the porch. Ella’s grandmother had thrown out the globe because it had a dent in Asia, and Roland had fished it out of the trashcan out back. Roland’s dog, Perry, followed him everywhere and was under the porch with him. Perry was a first-class leaper, and a shy dog.
Roland lived across the back alley and went under Ella’s grandmother’s porch all the time to smoke. Ella could see him now through the slats of the porch, hunched beneath her with his head down and his dog curled up in the dirt. The smoke from his cigarette came up through the floorboards of the porch. Ella didn’t mind the smell; it smelled just like Roland under the porch. Her grandmother no longer made a stink about Roland smoking under the porch, because if you hollered at Roland he would spray paint on your garage or break things. It was easier to just let him go under the porch, where he kept a stash of motorcycle magazines with pictures of men with tattoos.
Ella was bored. It was no good, being a girl in the world. The yards and bushes and woods all around her were full of dirty boys, chasing each other with sticks and throwing things and still hollering into the darkness when she was already in her bed. That’s unfortunate, her grandmother would say whenever Ella complained about her life.
Have a heart. That was another of Ella’s grandmother’s sayings. If her grandmother were to come out to the porch and see Ella torturing the fly in the bottle, that was exactly what she would say: Have a heart, Ella. That poor fly is one of God’s creatures.
Ella had never seen her grandfather, but he was in the world somewhere, and her grandmother was sour about it. There was a card on her grandmother’s bed stand, which had been there all the years that Ella could remember. The card featured a funny drawing of a man in a tuxedo. The man was holding a tray on which was a sparkling diamond ring. Inside the card someone had written “If you’re loving me like I’m loving you, baby, we’re really in love.” Those words, her grandmother said, were written by Hank Williams, but the handwriting was Ella’s grandfather’s. They weren’t, her grandmother said, worth the paper they were written on.
At least once a day Ella’s grandmother would drag her in under her chin, wheeze what sounded like tears into her hair, and murmur, “Bless your little pea-picking heart. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
Ella could not begin to formulate an answer to her grandmother’s question. All day the old woman sat at the kitchen table, scribbling away at her word search puzzles and watching a television that was on top of the refrigerator. Every afternoon in the summer Ella’s grandmother would send her up the street to the Gas-and-Go to fetch a bag of potato chips and a can of diet Cola. Her grandma would give Ella a five dollar bill and instruct her to get something to eat for herself as well. Ella would ride her bicycle to the library downtown and spend the remaining three dollars and twenty five cents making photo copies of beautiful women and beautiful clothing from fashion books and magazines. Shoved in the drawer of her nightstand and tucked in her school books Ella had hundreds of photo copies of exotic clothing –and shoes; Ella loved shoes– the likes of which she had never seen in Prentice. She also liked to make copies of photographs of sports cars. Ella wanted to be a secret agent like James Bond, only a girl. In her dreams she was often driving a stolen Jaguar through the streets of Prentice.
Ella’s grandmother was her father’s mother, and she would seldom give Ella information that was helpful in forming an impression of a man she could no longer remember. “He liked to put rocks in his pockets when he was a boy,” her grandmother would tell Ella. “I used to have a basket full of them down in the laundry room. Eddie’s rocks.” When pressed for more information, Ella’s grandmother would say things like, “He used to listen to a radio that was the shape of a motor oil can,” or, “He loved tomatoes.” One time she told Ella that her father had been a crackerjack jumper, the best in his class. “He got a ribbon for it,” she said. All of these details didn’t add up to much in Ella’s mind, and her conversations with her grandmother regarding her father always boiled down in the end to the fact that Ella’s father “hadn’t amounted to a hill of beans.” Men, she was told, were good for three things: running off, killing each other, and making babies they wanted no part of. Ella’s father, it turned out, was good for all three.
A few things:
That ugly business in the first inning has happened way too many times now to be dismissed as a mere fluke, but how the hell do you explain it? Beats the shit out of me.
You know how many times the Twins have scored four or fewer runs now this year? I do, I think. Thirty. That’s ridiculous, and isn’t going to get them deep in the playoffs any time soon. I’m not quite sure how moving Justin Morneau down to sixth in the order is going to help the team score more runs. Seems to me that with Torii Hunter riding out one of his hot streaks you’d want to take advantage of that by letting Morneau hit either in front of or behind him.
Also, the more I see of J.C. Romero the more I’m starting to understand why Ron Gardenhire has been turning to Terry Mulholland as his bullpen lefty in close ball games. That’s not saying much, of course.
Finally, check out John Bonnes’ Twins Territory for a great event for a great cause. The date is Tuesday, June 21 (Twins vs. Tigers at the Dome), and the proceeds go to Admission Possible, an organization that helps low-income kids gain admittance to college. A recent update is here. And you can buy your tickets directly here. I’ll be there, and it sounds like lots of other people much more interesting than me will be there as well.
It’s really that simple. One guy should not ever have the opportunity to hit three home runs off one pitcher in the same game. It’s just wrong, and stupid, particularly in a close game. I don’t care who the hitter is, or who’s on the mound. And never mind that Radke was allowed to hit and go out for one more inning.
You would think, though, that when a guy already has five homers off your pitching staff in the series, not to mention two in the game in question, that you’d at the very least alter your approach. You might even think about radically altering your approach. I might, anyway, but of course I’m not a Major League pitcher or manager, so what the hell do I really know?
I don’t doubt that players have hit three home runs in a game off one pitcher on many other occasions –actually, I do doubt that, but I’m sure its happened. I’m pretty sure, though, that it doesn’t happen with any frequency in close ball games, and I certainly can’t find a way to justify its occurrence under any circumstances.
The weird thing to me is how inevitable it seemed at the time. I don’t know about you, but I knew –I’m not shitting you, I knew— Choi was going to hit that third home run against Radke yesterday. Even Radke seemed resigned to the fact; I can’t see any other explanation for why he threw the pitch he threw in that situation.
Baseball really is a damn strange game, that’s all there is to it.
I’m not kidding you, for about twenty seconds I thought I was looking at a giant snail, and I mean a really giant snail, just the soft, slimy part without the shell, maybe six feet tall and walking upright –or creeping– like a man.
I saw the thing come slowly through the hedgerow at the back of the lawn. I was in my workshop in the garage, monkeying around with one thing or another. It was just after midnight and I was about ready to call it a night.
I had a big window right above my work bench that looked down the long slope of my backyard to the flower beds, the hedgerows, and the garden plots beyond. I saw a brief flash of reflected light when the giant snail first slipped through the bushes and out of the complete darkness.
I think there was a little bit of a moon that night, and I watched as the thing moved slowly along the edge of my yard in the dark shadows. I might have shook my head. I must have. The whole idea seemed alternately crazy and terrifying, but I would have sworn there was a giant snail sneaking towards my house.
I was so transfixed by this spectacle that I was taken completely by surprise when the motion light above the kitchen window popped on and revealed a stark naked Ted Hickock –pink, heaving, and glistening with sweat– standing in the middle of my backyard.
At one time Hickock had been my insurance agent. He was paralyzed for an instant when the backyard was flooded with light, and then he clumsily straddled my fence, plunged over, and trundled off into the darkness.
To this day I can’t explain why I never mentioned this disturbing incident to another soul, let alone called Hickock on it. I guess it seemed like such an awkward situation all around, and, frankly, I felt embarrassed for the man. Hell, this is a small town, and something like that could ruin a fellow’s reputation.
–Senior Citizen Center. Livingston, Montana
The other night I dreamt I was in a boat floating in thick fog, talking to God.
Look, He says to me, I’m just hoping to catch a few fish. I didn’t come down here to listen to you bitch.
I wouldn’t think you’d need to fish, I said.
Very few people in this world need to fish, He said. But it just so happens I like to fish. I’m a sportsman, and though, yes, I could technically cheat –at this as well as at anything else I damn well please– that’s never been my style. I don’t much go in for flashy stuff and intervention. The fish don’t know who’s on the other end of the line, and that’s the way I like it. The truth is that if they did know, it would only make it all the more difficult for me to catch them. Do you think for one minute that if those fish down there knew I was in this boat they would eagerly impale themselves on my hook just to make me happy? I can assure you they would not. Unless and until somebody wants or needs something virtually all of creation runs from me. Oh sure, there are nuts –there are always nuts– but I think you know what I mean. You’re all fish to me –understand, of course, that I’m now speaking metaphorically, but that’s the way I’ve always thought of you– and when I go fishing it’s virtually always bad news for somebody. And I’m terribly sorry, my friend, but today that somebody is you.
And with that God pushed me out of the boat.
–Senior Citizen Center. Livingston, Montana
I can’t deny that I am offended when certain individuals question my credentials as an authority on the sedentary lifestyle. God knows, yes, unquestionably I am offended. I say let these critics come here and gaze upon me in my unlaundered pajamas, as I slump here on the floor eating Tootsie Rolls and composing lazy and, quite honestly, uninspired monologues to my dog. I lack the energy or attention span for television. I can’t be bothered by the weather, understanding as I do that in my present state it can have no bearing –I’ve no intention of setting foot outdoors any time soon, implying as such an adventure would that I have some destination in mind, something compelling enough to drive me up the stairs for a change of clothing. Not likely. Not likely at all.
I suppose, though, that eventually –rather soon, actually– it will be necessary for me to venture out for a new supply of Mountain Dew.
Time doesn’t stand still. It never does that. It dribbles along the floor like a capsule full of light, throwing off odd little wobbly shadows. When the arm of the turntable drifts slowly across the black surface of the record and settles in its cradle the silence sounds like a car alarm bleating across the muffled fields in the darkness.
Haven’t moved. Sitting still. Some curiosity about that pile of books tottering in the corner. Looking for a moving surface, line, origin. Backspace. A clear dream would leave you even more confused than when you blank-screened your way through every flat stretch of darkness, with only some vague whoof booming in an otherwise empty fog.
Fred’s infatuated, you recall hearing some stranger say, and you try to imagine the rest of the story, to no avail. Outside your windows the night is full of people with big plans, lashed to each other by the lunging insecurity of a big city. Lost luggage. Elder clutter. Monument. Why, I oughtta….hang on a second. Hang on a second….No, sorry, it’s gone. Lost it. I felt an idea creeping along the margins of my brain.
I cannot the American say ‘piece of cake.’ Go far, I driving. Car has problem, slow, then not moving. My mother she mooing, with me unhappy. Things are problem. We must going a great distance away, life to do over. Beginning new, with family there in restaurant. Town is small. Wife she wants the television, things to sit.
I miss my days as a juggler, when I had a little bicycle and a wagon and I went from town to town, camping under the stars at night and entertaining in the streets and town squares every day. Eventually, however, things changed and it became necessary for me to make some adjustments in my act. The city fathers wanted me to include a message, to lecture the local children about bicycle safety and kindness to the elderly. Before too long I was instructed to include information regarding the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse, and to warn the children about the perils of unplanned pregnancy. I was told that I was no longer to camp out under the stars, and eventually the little town banned juggling altogether and I was conscripted to work in a local dental office.
I get disturbed when clothes disappear. Everyone does, I know, but it’s not like I can, you know, tolerate much disappearance. I have no wardrobe, dammit. I’m sorry, I can’t think straight. And I have to be honest with you, I never expected to see Mark Trail’s girlfriend –actually, I think they might be married now– in a bikini. I was just so taken aback.
I never learned how to say "These things don’t matter." I never learned how to sit still, to stare hard at one thing. I did, however, learn how to sit up all night, rocking in place, my mind a buzzing test pattern, the static symphony that follows "God Bless America" when the little local radio stations sign off for the night. But if you sit there on the floor for too long and for too many nights you start to lose touch with some of the old, vague stirrings, good feelings, what’s it’s like to walk in the quiet country, the stubbled fields dusted with snow, the hard gravel frozen under your feet. Walking the railroad tracks, the sky layered and gray and settling low over the landscape, the impressionism of late November, the muffled silence, a distant skreeing of a crow wobbling black above the trees. The murmur of a creek rippling through a fractured stretch of open water, the flat clanging of a railroad crossing further out in the country.
The ceaseless rustling of grain elevators, the farm houses settled down the long driveways in the falling darkness, the sound of your own breath, the rough rasp of prairie grass and corn stubble, dog clattering in the ditches, the tiny snap of a shotgun someplace far off in the country, the distant scrape of a jet plane sounding like a moon-dragged, storm-tossed sea. Spires on the horizon along the town’s edge, water towers, gas signs looming. You start to lose touch with those things, with the person you once were in a long ago place.
Now, back on the floor, Coltrane at his fattest and most mournful. Thick. Screwing higher, more lost, more puzzled, more hurt. Jimmy Garrison playing the bass like a talking drum. In the fog there is an automobile wearing a shroud, a casket wrapped in a flag, a large animal breathing through its nose, sinking deeper into the mud.
The board of directors retreats to a backwoods resort, where they will drink all weekend and brainstorm names for funeral homes. Forest Park. Shady Oak. Final Rest. Comfort Care. Sounds too much like a nursing home. Meadow Wood. Paradise Valley. Ever Rest. These names, they will all agree, sound too much like cemeteries, so for a time they will simply make up names, fictional families and hyphenated partnerships with some suggestion of quiet, appropriate dignity: Birnstead and Mather. Hambrooke and Pierce. Junius-Peavy. Aarden and Sons (The double-a was a nice touch and would gain them prime placement in the Yellow Pages). The board of directors intends to buy up funeral homes in small towns all over the Midwest, and then to franchise them back to the yokels. Death was a growth industry in these towns –death and methamphetamine– and even as they drink themselves insensate they are secure in the knowledge that their plan is a sound one.
