By the 3rd inning, I was already thoroughly bored and I could tell that my father, noticing my lack of interest, started becoming disappointed and frustrated.
We were sitting in the lower-level seats off right field just beyond first base, about 10 or so rows back. Pretty good seats really. Other boys my age along with their fathers, sat nearby with their well-seasoned leather mitts eagerly held at the ready to pick up a chance errant pop-up foul. I never even owned a baseball mitt.
“You gotta pay attention ‘cause if a ball comes this way you don’t want to get hit in the head with it.”, my father instructed to me. Frankly, until he warned me about it, I hadn’t really taken notice of the potential risk involved at being a spectator in seats so close to the field as we were. Now, to add to my boredom, I started to let a slight paranoia build inside me as I peered towards the player at bat and prayed he didn’t smack it towards me.
The weekend before, I had been on my Sunday morning shift at Bijou’s, the bistro-style restaurant/bar I worked part-time at as a dishwasher/general laborer. I was vacuuming the mint green-colored wall-to-wall carpeting pushing the loud and clunky silver machine's floor attachment back and forth across the rug, dancing to the cool jazz/disco beat of Herb Alpert's “Rise” when I noticed two rectangles of stiff printed paper lying on the floor under one of the tables. They were a pair of tickets to the next home game of the Boston Red Sox.
I dutifully turned them in to my boss, Janine, and she said she’d hold them in the lost and found drawer for a few days but if no one claimed them, they were mine. When they went unclaimed, I admitted to her that I hated sports and really wouldn’t have any interest in the tickets.
I think it was her who suggested that it might be a good idea for me to ask my dad to go to the game as a father-and-son outing. Deep inside, I thought the idea was hokey and somewhat old-fashioned.
Though I felt I loved my father, we didn’t have much in common and barely had many conversations at home, let alone go somewhere together, just the two of us.
But Janine, an out-and-proud lesbian (very rare in those days, especially as a business owner in a small, Catholic city) probably picked up on what I myself hadn’t fully realized. That even at the age of 15, I was already putting out gay vibes. Yeah, her gaydar had pinned it dead on, right off the bat, so to speak, and she knew that it’d be good for me to strengthen my relationship with my dad now in order to make it easier to deal with the eventual, and inevitable, coming-out process years down the road. She was a bright one, that Janine!
So here we were at Fenway Park in Boston, trying to make uncomfortable conversation with each other, munching on hot dogs and washing it down with a couple of ice cold beers.
“Huh? You were drinking beer, you ask? But you were 15!”
That’s right. My father had pretty much no compunction about allowing me to drink. Even out here in public. Plus it was the 70s. Nowadays, if someone was letting their kid drink beer out in public like that, they’d be risking some concerned citizen turning them in to child services. Back then, strangers kept to themselves about such things. No one ever intervened.
That whole summer at Bijou’s would be an introductory course in Booze 101 for me. When working ‘till closing on weekend nights, I’d be invited to sit at the bar with the waitresses (and one gay waiter) while the owner allowed us to have a “couple” on the house as she tallied up the evenings receipts.
I usually just had a beer or two, and I avoided joining the others “out back” for the occasional toke on a shared joint. The bar had all these glossy advertisement tents for a drink called “The Universe” and one night I asked if I could try that. Janine giggled, thought about it, and figured, “Why not!”. A vodka and Midori concoction, it tasted like Kool-Aid. Yum! I sucked it down rather quickly…it was so sweet and delicious. Needless to say, I was bowing to the porcelain god a couple hours later.
At the baseball game, my father allowed me only one beer. I guess he drew the line at actually getting his child falling down drunk in public. I could do that during house parties, but that would be in the privacy of the home.
So the afternoon slowly dragged on as the buzz from my one beer dwindled, and my fear of getting knocked-out-cold by a powerful foul ball intensified. I impatiently sat there wishing I hadn’t found those damned tickets.
I couldn’t wait until this stupid game was over and we could get to the car and sit silently ignoring each other during the long drive back to Rhode Island.
We were sitting in the lower-level seats off right field just beyond first base, about 10 or so rows back. Pretty good seats really. Other boys my age along with their fathers, sat nearby with their well-seasoned leather mitts eagerly held at the ready to pick up a chance errant pop-up foul. I never even owned a baseball mitt.
“You gotta pay attention ‘cause if a ball comes this way you don’t want to get hit in the head with it.”, my father instructed to me. Frankly, until he warned me about it, I hadn’t really taken notice of the potential risk involved at being a spectator in seats so close to the field as we were. Now, to add to my boredom, I started to let a slight paranoia build inside me as I peered towards the player at bat and prayed he didn’t smack it towards me.
The weekend before, I had been on my Sunday morning shift at Bijou’s, the bistro-style restaurant/bar I worked part-time at as a dishwasher/general laborer. I was vacuuming the mint green-colored wall-to-wall carpeting pushing the loud and clunky silver machine's floor attachment back and forth across the rug, dancing to the cool jazz/disco beat of Herb Alpert's “Rise” when I noticed two rectangles of stiff printed paper lying on the floor under one of the tables. They were a pair of tickets to the next home game of the Boston Red Sox.
I dutifully turned them in to my boss, Janine, and she said she’d hold them in the lost and found drawer for a few days but if no one claimed them, they were mine. When they went unclaimed, I admitted to her that I hated sports and really wouldn’t have any interest in the tickets.
I think it was her who suggested that it might be a good idea for me to ask my dad to go to the game as a father-and-son outing. Deep inside, I thought the idea was hokey and somewhat old-fashioned.
Though I felt I loved my father, we didn’t have much in common and barely had many conversations at home, let alone go somewhere together, just the two of us.
But Janine, an out-and-proud lesbian (very rare in those days, especially as a business owner in a small, Catholic city) probably picked up on what I myself hadn’t fully realized. That even at the age of 15, I was already putting out gay vibes. Yeah, her gaydar had pinned it dead on, right off the bat, so to speak, and she knew that it’d be good for me to strengthen my relationship with my dad now in order to make it easier to deal with the eventual, and inevitable, coming-out process years down the road. She was a bright one, that Janine!
So here we were at Fenway Park in Boston, trying to make uncomfortable conversation with each other, munching on hot dogs and washing it down with a couple of ice cold beers.
“Huh? You were drinking beer, you ask? But you were 15!”
That’s right. My father had pretty much no compunction about allowing me to drink. Even out here in public. Plus it was the 70s. Nowadays, if someone was letting their kid drink beer out in public like that, they’d be risking some concerned citizen turning them in to child services. Back then, strangers kept to themselves about such things. No one ever intervened.
That whole summer at Bijou’s would be an introductory course in Booze 101 for me. When working ‘till closing on weekend nights, I’d be invited to sit at the bar with the waitresses (and one gay waiter) while the owner allowed us to have a “couple” on the house as she tallied up the evenings receipts.
I usually just had a beer or two, and I avoided joining the others “out back” for the occasional toke on a shared joint. The bar had all these glossy advertisement tents for a drink called “The Universe” and one night I asked if I could try that. Janine giggled, thought about it, and figured, “Why not!”. A vodka and Midori concoction, it tasted like Kool-Aid. Yum! I sucked it down rather quickly…it was so sweet and delicious. Needless to say, I was bowing to the porcelain god a couple hours later.
At the baseball game, my father allowed me only one beer. I guess he drew the line at actually getting his child falling down drunk in public. I could do that during house parties, but that would be in the privacy of the home.
So the afternoon slowly dragged on as the buzz from my one beer dwindled, and my fear of getting knocked-out-cold by a powerful foul ball intensified. I impatiently sat there wishing I hadn’t found those damned tickets.
I couldn’t wait until this stupid game was over and we could get to the car and sit silently ignoring each other during the long drive back to Rhode Island.