catfish 29

 It's not a penthouse.  A penthouse is a little house on top of a skyscraper so that the roof becomes like your lawn, so I imagine you could be napping under a tree and wake up and stroll away and there you would be at a 60 story drop which seems a bit eerie.  It's just a balcony, although a pretty good sized one.  

When I lived in Texas I had a little balcony at the back of my 2nd floor apartment.  It didn't overlook anything just some weed trees and the dumpster, but it was nice to have a bit of the outdoors just a doorway from your indoors.  

When I first went condo hunting I saw a lot of highrise apartments where you walked right up to a floor to ceiling window and that was it.  The view was good but you were sealed away from the outdoors like a human sardine behind cellophane.  I didn't like that at all.  

Those were older buildings.  Buildings built in the past twenty or thirty years all have balconies and when they convert warehouses and office buildings to condos the first thing they do is punch these little metal balconies into every window.  But if you look up, even on a really nice day you hardly ever see anybody on them, I don't know why.

The latest poll has 52 percent of Republicans believing that Trump won the last election.  Astonishing, but I think maybe it had been higher earlier.  I wonder how the pollsters determined who was a rep or a dem or an ind.  A lot of these Trumpsters had no party before Trump, and I guess maybe they call themselves reps now.  But still there were a lot of conservative and even some moderates in the party before Trump,  Nasty peckerwoods to my way of thinking, but still, you know, sane.  Now it looks like a large percentage of them have drunk the Trump-Ade.  

I went to Trump's new spot:  https://www.donaldjtrump.com/desk 

Now that he is bounced off twitter, and it's just so ho hum.  It is still a pack of outrageous lies, but all dressed up in paragraphs and stuff, it just has no punch.  Here's hoping he will fade not with a bang but a whimper.  I think Beagles still thinks that Trump might be some democratic agent.  I wonder what he thinks of this Marjorie Greene, in her actions she often seems like somebody placed there to destroy the Trumpicans.

Meanwhile the story becomes a little surreal as Dan propels the team to greatness.

 

Tiger was at least clean when we got him out to the practice field.  He was muttering, shaking, but he was at least clean.  Dan led him out to the pitchers mound and then I noticed the two new guys at second and shortstop.  They were like Greek statues, except they were wearing clothes, big beefy guys, hanging there in the middle of the infield, caps creased like in the majors, like I had tried to crease mine in the mirror, but could never get the hang of.  They had their hands on their knees, slouching like they weren’t paying any attention, but their eyes, ice blue, they were both fair haired boys, were fixed on the pitch and when the weak grounder went to the left of the infield the one guy charged in and scooped in and got to it, and in the same motion hurled it to the other guy just as he was crossing past second who gave it a hard sidearm right at first.  Itch threw up his glove just before it drilled him between the eyes, staggered back a little, and pulling off his glove shook his hand in the air.

 “Who are these guys?” I asked Dan.

 “Tinkers and Evers,” he answered.

 “Huh?” But by then Dan had gotten Tiger to the mound and was waving his arms in the air.

 “Team meeting,” he announced.  “First thing,” he started, “You guys,” and here he pointed at the bunkhouse guys who had been our shortstop and second baseman, “Are out.  Get the hell out of here.”  And I have to say they didn’t take it too hard, heading back to the Great Wall to make last call for happy hour.

 “Second thing.  This here’s Tiger,” and he slapped him on the back too hard sending him face down onto the mound, and helping him up announced, “He’s our new pitcher.”

 “Third thing.  These two guys,” and he gestured out to the middle of the infield, “are our new shortstop and second baseman, Tinkers and Evers.”

 “Tinkers and Evers?” Itch asked from first base.  “That’s not their real names is it?” and he looked at them, like maybe they would say something, let him in on the joke, but they just slouched their athletes slouch, eyes forward, not even turning to look at him.

 “As far as you’re concerned, and as far as anybody else on this sorry piece of shit team is concerned, those are their names.  Not that any of you need to concern yourselves with it because I don’t want any of you bums talking to them.  I don’t want any of your Cub fan loser ways rubbing off on them.”

 “But Tinker and Evers, they were Cubs,” Itch objected.

 That stopped Dan a little bit, but he came back with, “That was before Wrigley Field,” and that seemed to stop all conversation, that and the way Tinkers and Evers didn’t even seem to notice or care that they were being talked about, slouching in their positions like horses in their stalls on derby day.

 Dan handed Tiger the ball, and Tiger just stared at it until Dan pointed him at home.  I was trotting into the outfield, but I caught the word, “Remember?” and also caught Tiger’s shake of the head.  A pint of ruby port came out of Dan’s back pocket.  He quickly pulled it away from Tiger’s lunge and walked it back to home and settled it back behind the catcher.  Tiger’s gaze never left lt.

 “Throw it,” Dan said and Tiger went into a windup.  Dan threw up his hands and walked out to the mound.  “You got to throw it underhand,” he told Tiger.

 “Underhand?” Tiger asked.

 “Yeah underhand, like so,” and he showed him the motion.

 “How come?” Tiger wanted to know.

 “Because this is softball, it’s the way it’s done.”

 “Softball?”

 “Yeah, it’s just like baseball only the ball is bigger.  And you have to pitch it underhand.”

 “Underhand?”

 “Yeah, like so,” and he made the motion again.

 “How come?”

 “Just the way it is,” Dan explained and headed back behind the plate, kind of waving the pint all the way back, set it down just behind the plate, just where a strike would bounce after crossing the zone.

 Tiger shrugged his shoulders, crouched, and lofted the ball up in an arc and it came down splat right on top of the bottle knocking it over, but kind of gentle like, so it just bounced back a little into the soft dirt behind the plate.

 Damn, I thought it was just a lucky throw, but the next one went to the same place, and the one after that, and the next one.

 “Okay then, batter up,” and that happened to be Ted who was standing closest to the plate, and he whiffed three times just like that, and I’m wondering how he missed them because they all looked so fat. 

 And then I was next up, and I’m thinking I’m going to do better than Ted because by now I have that keeping my eyes open thing going and I’m going to at least hit a grounder or two and that ball came in so big and fat and all I wanted to do was meet it, but it was something strange it just seemed to veer off somewhere and I couldn’t touch it.

 Nobody could.  Well Tinkers and Evers could, but even them it was just pop ups and lazy fly balls.  Pissed them off a little, I could tell that even though they were too cool to let on much.

 Wasn’t much of a practice really, with Tiger on the mound, except for Tinkers and Evers nobody was hitting anything and so nobody was getting any practice in the field either.  Usually it went on for at least a couple hours, but Dan called it off after one.  “I’ve seen enough,” he said smiling to beat the band.  He walked out to the mound and handed Tiger his pint.  Tiger was smiling to beat the band too then.  He emptied half of it before Dan had walked him back to the plate.

 As I was heading out to The Great Wall with the rest of the guys, Ron came up beside me.  “Hey Catfish,” he wanted to know, “Want to go out to Club 45?”

 Club 45 was this roadhouse, halfway up Route 45 to Rantoul, had kind of a rough reputation.

 “Ah, I don’t think so.”

 “Wild women,” he urged.

 “What about Tammy?” I asked.

 “What about her?” he looked at me like I’d said something stupid which I guess I had.

 “Well I was just wondering, haven’t seen her the last couple days.”

 “She’s been, not feeling too well,” he said veering off to his car.  Didn’t like the sound of that.