Highball

It is a nice hotel, the way these things go. A business-upscale sort of place with towels that feel like they have never been used and carpet that smells as though it was just laid. The lights are all lit and the elevator chimes and runs smoothly. A something-express, in the middle of nowhere, it seems. Notable facts of the town included that it was the birthplace of some astronaut that never made it to the moon. Not much else.

From his sixth-floor room, Daniel can see the town in the distance. A nipple on the other side of a broad chest. There is a shopping center plaza between here and there with a sea of asphalt before it peppered with cars that look like tiny arranged speed boats. In the plaza are a few pizza shops and a Walmart. He smiles at it, though it isn’t very esthetically pleasing.

He showers and puts his things away for the night. In the morning, he will be on his way to another town, and this Podunk will be a memory. The same routine. The more things change, the more they stay the same, his grandmother used to say. He thinks it was from some French philosopher. His grandmother was an intellectual woman who killed herself in 1983. He has no idea what the expression really means, but he says it to himself, standing in that window, looking out across the valley.

He is an attractive man, but he is more handsome than he feels himself to be. He knows what lies within his soul, which blackens his outward view. He often finds the need to reassure himself that he is handsome so to have confidence in life. Women and alcohol are his boosters. His easy injections of self-esteem. He catches his own reflection in the hotel window glass and smiles. Dusk paints the sky in the valley a purpling shade of pink. Then he scrutinizes himself in the bathroom mirror and trims his nose hair with one of those vibrating doohickeys the father in Gremlins probably once sold. Gremlins, he thinks smiling. They are something from an age lost.

His hair is thinning, Rogaine never helped, and wrinkles contort his face when he smiles, but it is only because he is tired. He hasn’t had much sleep the last week or so. One night of sleep and he will be as good as new, he tells himself. All the wrinkles will go away and his hair will be thick again. He blames his new pomade.

He does some push-ups. His shoulder aches. His arms and chest look good. He puts on his swim trunks and goes down to the hotel pool. There are three women sitting in chairs. Though his vison is blurry without his contacts, two of them look doable. The other one looks to be their mother and is the size of them both combined. The concrete is new, as is the pool. The hotel was built within a year, the lumpy red-headed kid at the front desk said when he checked in. Who stays all the way out here? He asked. Mostly people on business for the plastics company that is headquartered here. Or people visiting the university. The university, the kid seemed to say, with a capital U. They made the NCAA men’s basketball tournament one year, apparently.

Daniel jumps into the pool. Forty-two years old and he still jumps into the pool like a goofy kid. Like he is at the camp he went for five years straight so his parents could do whatever they did without him. The water is cold and it is early evening so there is no sun on this side of the building to warm anything up. It’s June, but it had been a cooler June, thus far. It doesn’t matter, though. He doesn’t want to be warm. He read somewhere in a men’s magazine that cold water rejuvenates the skin and the libido and that is what he wants. Rejuvenated skin and a V12 fuel-injected libido.

The two girls giggle sitting in their yellow beach chairs. Their heavyset mother smirks, looking at the pictures in a magazine. He looks like an actor, they all agree. But they can’t think of the actor’s name. It’s going to bother me, mom says, looking as though she is going to eat the magazine.

There is no one else in the pool. Daniel sinks to the bottom and opens his eyes. He sits on the bottom for as long as he can with his eyes open in a sort of meditative state and for thirty seconds it feels as though he is in another universe. At camp as a kid. Pitching in a little league game. He thinks of Jonah and the Whale for some reason, and can’t remember the moral of the story exactly, or who Jonah was. He will read about it later, he tells himself. An old Sunday school lesson lost in his head somewhere.

Two pairs of legs jump in. He hears giggling, muffled under the water. The blurry-faced doables that were sitting on the yellow beach chairs he knows by their blurry and knobby knees. He comes up for air and they are looking at him, grinning.

He gets out of the pool and smiles at them. Water dripping off his shorts and legs. The hair painted to his legs. His nipples are hard and he gets goosebumps getting a warm towel from the outside rack. His muscles constrict and he likes the thought of what he must look like to them. He likes that they are looking still as he dries off. It makes him feel younger and virile. He doesn’t have time to test the stringency of their chaperone’s defense, as he might have on another occasion, or to consider their age, which would be of importance.

It is almost seven and his date will be coming soon. He wants to have some drinks before she gets here, which always makes it go better than when he is sober. It is just part of the warm-up routine. It has always been that way.

He leaves footprints across the new concrete. He forgot his sandals and he feels like a bit of a bum walking into the hotel with no shoes, but he hurries to an elevator and no one sees him. He goes back up to his room on six to get dressed in clothes he laid out previously that hang like the husk of a lynched man on the back of the bathroom door. The rosary hangs from his neck against his bronze chest. His mother would have scolded him for wearing a rosary as a necklace, especially in the pool, but she is dead now so she doesn’t scold anyone anymore. His father wouldn’t have cared and would have had a drink. But he is dead, too, and likely having a highball somewhere.

Highball, he thinks. How his father made that word so glorious in his mind the way he said it. The joy in his eye that came with that word. How he envied him with that drink in his hand, like he was a God, jiggling the glass, smoking a cigarette.

Daniel straightens the room and leaves the blinds open. The sky purples swollen like a bruise as he gets dressed and the little town across the plaza and the Walmart lights up like someone threw a switch. Streetlights appear like a landing strip from here to there. Like rows of the whale’s teeth, deep in the jaws of his thoughts of Jonah still. He sprays some cologne and gargles some mouthwash. Long tossing in the bullpen.

He walks confidently into the hotel bar. It’s nice, a curious anomaly for such a small town. The hotel is a microcosm of culture in an otherwise cultureless and bleak community, he assesses critically, intended to make traveling businessmen and women feel at home in an otherwise bleary poke. It is a beacon of sophistication, little different than a space-station on Mars, and it employs hundreds of locals who do their best to fit in while within it.

Eight on the dot and he orders his first highball of the evening. He had three at lunch. He admires the way the lights twinkle in the bar glasses that hang under the mahogany bar. The bartender has a handlebar mustache and tattoos and the barmaids are relatively pretty. Thick, but pretty. One is thin, but she looks worn. Like the worn saddle of a rodeo bull in a honky-tonk.

The TVs all play a Yankees-Red Sox game from Fenway that is in the bottom of the second. Daniel drinks the first highball quick and orders another. He wants three in him before she arrives, if she does. And three after that should do him just fine. It should sufficiently kill what needs killed and bear what needs to be bore. An older man has a seat next to him. One of those businessmen in town for plastics, or visiting the University, he immediately presumes.

The man looks at Daniel and grins. He is older, near retirement or past. The bar light can be deceiving the way it casts shadows. He has Grecian, slicked-back hair and a dark-blue suit that looks neither expensive, nor cheap. His button-up shirt is open and a gold chain and eagle pendant dangles there against a bush of gray chest-hair. His eyes are watery and he is not tall, but not short, neither heavy nor thin. There are purple liver-spots on his hands and he wears a gold watch that he fidgets with and a gold chain that goes along with it as he waits for the bartender.

“I’ll have what he’s having,” the old man says to the eager bartender. He looks up at the TV and follows it to Daniel’s eyes who is gazing at it, not noticing him.

“Highball,” the bartender says. Daniel perks up with the mention of the word, looks at his drink, then at the man who is seated next to him.

“I am Saul,” the man takes the opportunity.

“Here on business?” Daniel asks easily. He shakes his glass.

“I am.”

“University or plastic?” Daniel asks.

Saul smiles. “Neither. The business of sleep. I am just passing through.”

“I was told by the kid at check-in that people are here for only two reasons only. Plastics or the University.”

“So which applies to you?” Saul returns, looking up at the game.

Daniel grins just to grin, looking back at him. “Neither. I’m just passing through.”

“Well, we both defy expectations.”

“Indeed, we do,” Daniel says holding his glass high.

The bartender brings Saul his drink. Daniel holds his up for another, jingling it like a bell, then finishes what’s left quickly so the bartender can take the glass. He looks at a passing barmaid, who glances back at him. There is nothing decent in either direction. Neither civility, nor admiration. Fleeting lust, the product of a lack of self-worth and low self-esteem, which are two very distinct things. He checks his watch. An Apple watch some woman he hardly recalls from Lafayette, Indiana bought him for Christmas last year. A married mother of three. In blue-green letters, the color of Saul’s eyes, it reads, 8:30. Getting closer. Familiar butterflies in the stomach.

Someone hits a homerun much to the pleasure of the home crowd on TV, but much to the dismay of the pitcher who sulks on the mound, kicking the dirt, massaging a new baseball, and rubbing his brow. The cameras pan from his anguish to seats of ecstatic fans whose jubilation lasts only a minute or two. It’s still early in the game after all, plenty of time to lose it.

The bartender brings Daniel’s highball and smiles as he sits it on a salted napkin then darts off to one of the other patrons, a tubby man certainly of plastic sitting at the end of the bar. There is a half-dozen other plastic men and women at the bar and a large table of University folks behind them. You can tell the University folks from the plastic people because their heads are larger and their eyes are big observant golf balls, six of which are spectacled. Daniel has learned to be observant over the years. To recognize his surroundings and to learn how to pitch to a 3-2 count.

“You played, didn’t you?” Saul asks, jiggling his drink, mixing the whisky and soda.

“Yes. I did. Ten years. Only two in the majors.”

“I saw you pitch in Cleveland. Daniel Stork. You had a good curve you could throw for a strike on any count.”

“Not much else,” Daniel smiles.

“What are you doing these days?”

“Drinking.”

“Anything else?”

“Passing through.”

“Me too,” Saul says.

A short while passes. Saul buys Daniel another drink. The third he wanted before the woman arrives. Daniel thanks him and tells him he has a date that should be coming in, so not to be rude, but doesn’t say much else. He’s on the bench between innings and throwing a shut-out. Don’t jinx me old man, he says with a look. The old man ignores the sign and chatters away.

“Daniel, I used to do terrible work. I would hurt people for a living. I killed people. I was paid to hurt people. I can be honest about it, because I have done my time and I have been forgiven by the Almighty. But what I have learned is that you cannot keep running from your purpose.”

Daniel laughs. He shakes his head and exhales half a life, it seems. A beautiful blonde in a slinky red dress walks in and sits a few stools down to his right. She is the immediate contingency plan, in case his date doesn’t show. She is in plastics, surely.

“You would throw curve after curve,” Saul continues. “One of the best curves in the majors, no doubt about it. And you could rare back and throw a fastball when you needed to. But you never trusted that pitch. You were so afraid of letting hitters hit you and letting the fielders behind you field and catch. The Tommy John surgery put you out for two years and the curve didn’t break like it did before. It was sad. It’s time to stop throwing curves and to let the batters hit.”

“I don’t pitch, anymore, Saul.”

“We all still pitch in this game,” Saul says. And with that, he stands up and puts a twenty on the bar top and winks at Daniel. “The inevitable purpose of anyone can be found by forgiving yourself and having faith in God to show you your purpose in His time. But you must first stop running from Him for he will inevitably catch up to you if not.”

He says no more and walks out. Daniel follows him with perplexed eyes. As he exits, Saul holds the door for a beautiful woman, which proves to be Daniel’s date. She smiles at the old man and walks in nervously. Her eyes full of whisky and her hair flowing, brown and twisty. She looks thirsty and starved. She is thin and short. Everything she was in the pictures augmented and enhanced by the enchantment of bar lights and animation. Daniel shakes his glass and walks to greet her and they take a table where the barmaid he leered out before, smiles for their new beginning and offers them both menus.

“Long drive?” she asks.

“Five hours.”

“I am so happy you came! I have been looking forward to this since we started chatting. You have no idea!”

“Me too,” he smiles. He can still smell the chlorine on his skin, under the aftershave lotion. Under the body cream and the cologne. He thinks of the four blurry knees of those girls in the pool. He hears the sound in his ears of their giggling as he sits under the water. He is gripping the whisky glass like the two-seam fastball he never could throw by anyone.

“How long have you been here?” she asks.

“I checked in at three,” he says looking at the glass. Looking over his grip. It becomes a ball in his mind and he holds it curiously, then as if by instinct, he reverts to the more comfortable grip of the curve. He thinks about the old man’s advice. He reminds him of a pitching coach he had in double A. Hell, maybe he was him. He spent that year drunk, mostly. There was no lying to himself suddenly. He was an alcoholic and the drink he held in his hand had taken away everything he ever really loved. The crowd cheers on the TV as someone knocks a triple into the left-center gap. Two score, but it’s still early enough to lose it.

“How long have you been married, Katarina?”

“Katarina? My name is Kristin.”

“Oh. I’m sorry, Kristin.” He bites his lip and rubs the subtle gray stubble of his chin. Katarina was in Toledo two nights ago. They were both brunettes. All the women become an amalgamated blur with little to no distinctions after it is done. Like past crowds at games who were mostly blurs of bleeding color. 

She smiles as though to forgive him. It isn’t much of an indiscretion, she thinks, after everything he said to her over the past few weeks. All the things she ever wanted someone to say to her that they hadn’t. He is handsome in the bar light. She adores the way he smiles at her and his eyes pierce the frail will she has to resist him. He never told her he was a major league pitcher. That he keeps to himself. He sells insurance now and that is what he is to everyone he meets so not to answer the same question they all would ask. What is it like to pitch in the big leagues? He is an insurance salesman from Ohio with a preference for married brunettes. Kids or no kids. No matter.  

“How long have you been married, Kristin?”

“Ten years. We got married when I was eighteen. It seemed like the right thing to do then. I was young.”

“Married too soon?”

“Yes. Much too soon,” she eagerly agrees. “What else was there, though? I never knew anyone like you and for a while he was nice.”

“Have you been with anyone other than your husband.”

“No, never once.”

He salivates. Normally, he would be paying the check by now. But he goes on. “Kids?”

“Yes,” she admits reluctantly, hoping not to dissuade him, but not willing to ever deny her kids. “Four.”

“Four kids?” He was in his routine now. Every answer she gave beget an instinctive follow-up question. It was like surgery. He did it all a thousand times before. He monitored her vitals as he cut.

“Yes,” she smiles. “Boys.” She looks up at the TV. “And they all love baseball.”

He nods and has another drink. Thunder cracks and a sheet of rain assails the large window next to their table. She jumps a little, then laughs at herself. “I’m sorry,” she apologizes. “Storms scare me. Ever since I was a little girl.”

“Do you remember being a little girl?”

She smiles. “Sometimes. Do you remember being a little boy?”

He pauses, then smiles back. “Sometimes.”

“My husband doesn’t love me. He doesn’t pay any attention to me. There is no affection. Maybe it is wrong of me to be here, but I am here. I want to be here. We are getting a divorce.”

“Yes, you are certainly here.”

“And you are here!” She grins and reaches across the table to touch his arm. The barmaid brings her drink which she stirs up like a kid would a milkshake. It is a red margarita.

“Yes, I am.” He listens to the crowd on the TV. They are booing. New York came back. The starter gave up a three-run homer. Plenty of time to lose it. The announcer said he threw a curve that hung up in the strike-zone. You hang it, they’ll bang it, the other announcer says. Flatline.

“So,” she says.

“Go home, Kristin,” he says abruptly.

“What?”

Daniel shakes his head. He takes a drink for more confidence. The ice crashes upon on his upper lip which reminds him of his realization that he is an alcoholic. But he doesn’t need drinks for confidence. It destroys will and moral character. He quickly puts it down and pushes it to a neutral spot on the table. He then says softly, “Go home, please. Don’t get divorced, yet. Work things out with your husband, if you can. If he doesn’t beat you, or abuse you, maybe he wants to work it out, too. Maybe he feels the exact same way that you feel, but doesn’t know how to explain it to you. This may be the only decent damn thing I’ve ever done in my whole damn life. Go home. I shouldn’t have come here. And I shouldn’t have invited you to join me. There is nothing about this that is right at all.”

“Are you really serious?”

“Yes. I’m finally serious about something in my life. Step one. I am giving up the alcohol. Step two. I am giving up the women.”

“The women?”

“Yes. The women. The confidence boosters that come and go. The cortisone shots in my shoulder so I can pitch. The adulation of the home crowd.”

“Wait. I don’t understand. Is there something wrong with me?” Her drink sits untouched in front of her.

“Yes. You’re married. That’s what is wrong. And I am in love with my ex. Other than that, nothing is wrong at all. You are beautiful. You’re absolutely gorgeous. But I haven’t the heart for this anymore. In less than a year I have slept with fifty or sixty married women across the country. That is what I do, when I am not selling insurance. It’s gotten to the point that I can’t be with a single woman anymore. They are either married, or I am not interested. I have sat here for the last hour or so and thought of how I could have become so depraved. Over the course of twenty years, I must have slept with thousands of married women. I might have fathered hundreds of kids that other men are raising as their own now. I came here to do the same to you, that is all I intended to do. In the morning, I would leave and you would never hear from me again. I had no intention to stay here. To get a job like I said, or to help raise your kids.”

Tears stream down her face. She holds her hands over her eyes, but it is of little use. There is a tan line where her wedding ring had been for ten years. It is in her car in the center console for the drive home. A half-carat of misery, she calls it.

“But you drove all this way?” she says, “Five hours?”

“Five hours to nowhere.”

“Nowhere? Everywhere is somewhere and everyone is someone. I don’t know who you think you are. You got some nerve to treat me this way, like I am nothing.”

“Nowhere is where I was heading. It is not here. It’s where you’ll be heading, too, if you go down this road. If you’re miserable, get divorced and do it that way. Find someone to respect and love you. Not to be used one night in a hotel a mile from your house while your husband and kids are home watching movies and eating popcorn. If I had invited you up to my room, that would be treating you like nothing. This is love. Respecting you. Not all love stories are pretty.”

She huffs, still discouraged, but a little less dismayed. Her beautiful face that had been so carefree and happy only a minute ago, is now distraught with the deluge of tears and mascara.  

Daniel sighs, leans back in his seat. Regretting at first what he had just done, but knowing it is right. It feels uncomfortable being out of his routine. He is throwing fastballs now. He looks up at the lights. Lightning flashes outside the window, but this time no thunder. No rain. He thinks of his son at home who is seven now. He thinks of his ex-girlfriend who has certainly moved on and well she should have after what he has done to her. The alcoholism and womanizing. She did her best to get him help and to help him into the light, but he wouldn’t go. Not without a highball. Maybe after one more woman. He was fine, he said to her. They never meant anything to me anyway.

Surely, she wouldn’t take him back after all the damage he’s done. She was his one real love, he knows in the hole in his heart where everything falls through. The only unmistakable truth he has ever known is that. There is never a substitute feeling for that which he has for her. That which keeps him wearing the rosary, despite his transgressions, in hopes that he can be who he wants to be and now who he finally is. There was no hope if he doesn’t stop drinking to be who he wants to be. To let go of the highballs and to give up the false sense of control. There is no hope if he doesn’t stop driving himself to nowhere. This is step one. The freedom of letting this twisted hunting of women pass. That which always made him feel worse at checkout. So many wasted years, he rued. Wasted nights he could have been reading to his kid, or teaching him how to throw a good two-seamer. He reaches down and grabs the rosary.

The man comes into the bar in a rush. He is wearing old ripped jeans and a tight t-shirt. He is wearing a ballcap and he looks drunk and tired in his eyes. It is the look of heartbreak. He is carrying a shotgun. The bartender sees it and screams, “Gun!” and ducks behind the bar. People freeze, including Kristin and Daniel. The Red Sox tie it in the bottom half of seven as the gun blasts, shattering the window besides Daniel’s head. He tries to tackle the girl who is standing looking blankly back at her husband, but before he can, a second blast blows her back off her feet into the shattered window, leaving Daniel collapsed over the table. A third shot tears into his side and feels like hell had burned a hole into his gut.

A different bang rings out soon after and the man falls in the middle of the bar. The shotgun beside him. He lies face down in a heart-shaped pool of blood that expands around him. The second gunman puts his gun away. He announces that he is an off-duty deputy sheriff and tells everyone to remain calm and to slowly exit the bar. Everyone runs.

Daniel clutches his side, slumped down behind the table. The flow of warm blood quickly fills his cupped hand and pours through his fingers. The barmaid comes to his aid and says she is a nursing student at the University and tells him to breathe so he doesn’t go into shock. She puts her hand behind his head and cradles it and rips off her shirt which she uses to apply pressure to his side. The blood rushes through her fingers, but she doesn’t panic. The shirt is soaked in a minute or so, but it is black so only her warm, wet hand knows the difference. The people standing around just gawk.

Through the broken window the sirens of an ambulance and several cop cars blare. Kristin lies in a mulched bed of boxwoods. A hole the size of a fist through her chest. What remains of her heart is somewhere strewn across the lawn and her mouth pours a fountain of blood. Her husband is dead, shot once in the back of the head. The kids are at home being minded by the eldest. A ten-year-old boy who is watching the Yankees bat in the top of the eighth, hoping for a home run.

Three days later, Saul comes to the University hospital. He passes a beautiful woman who is crying and a young boy on his way down the busy hall. The woman’s hand covers her face as though she is trying to hide her tears. Her son looks like he is in shock and he holds on to her hand for dear life.

“I think I passed your ex,” Saul says entering the room.

“Yes. She just left.” Daniel sighs. “I expected you to come. Are you Death?”

“No. I’m Saul. You may know me better as the Apostle Paul. Death is a much taller fellow and you’ll know him when you see him.”

Daniel shakes his head. “What do you want, Saul?”

“Were you ever blinded by stadium lights when you looked up suddenly, Daniel?”

Daniel shot him a contemplative look. “A few times.”

“But you didn’t heed God’s calling.”

Daniel doesn’t reply.

“Did you see the flash of that shotgun?”

Daniel shook his head no.

“What did you tell your ex?”

“I told her the truth.”

“You told her why you were at the hotel.”

“Yes.”

“Did you tell her what you said to that woman?”

“Yes.”

“And what did she say?”

“Nothing. She just cried.”

“You must forgive yourself before anyone else can forgive you.”

“I know, Saul.”

“Will you stop running from God now, Daniel?”

“I have stopped. He caught up to me.”

“Where are your going to go after here?”

“Somewhere.”

“Where?"

“Five hours in the other direction. Home.”

“Will you ever stop throwing curveballs?”

“I don’t have any left in me.”

Saul smiles and puts his hand on Daniel’s face and prays over him.

The next day, Daniel wakes up. Drunk in the hotel. He is confused and runs down to the lobby and to the bar. The bartender is wiping down the bar top. It is around two.

“Hair of the dog?” the bartender smiles.

“No,” Daniel says in a panic. “What happened last night?”

“Well, you got pretty lit up. You had a few too many highballs. We had to carry you to the room after you passed out at the bar. Hope you slept okay.”

Daniel reaches down to his side and there is no wound. No bandage. The glass by the table where he sat is intact and the sun shines through it, playing off the mahogany of the bar tables and the underside panels of the bar.

“Did a woman come in last night to see me?”

The bartender thought for a moment. “Yes. Yes, there was a woman. A very fine woman. Short and skinny. But you told her to go home to her husband and she cried and ran out. I bought you a drink for that one. Never imagined in twenty years I’d ever hear anyone say something like that to someone who looked like that. You broke her heart. She was gorgeous. I’d like to think I’d do the same, but I don’t think so.”

Daniel shakes his head. An afternoon game is on TV, which is blurred by the flood of sunlight. Red Sox-Yankees doing it again.

“Want a drink, on me?”

“No. I’m fine, thank you. I am giving it up.”

“Good for you. I hope you stick to it. I haven’t drank a drop in eight years. I am a recovering alcoholic bartender,” he smiles. “Imagine that.”

Daniel walks out and goes back to his room and packs his bags. He changes into his swim trunks and goes out to the pool where it is hot and sunny. It is five hours to home and he thinks the cold water might sober him up some. The two girls and their mom are in the water. He is wearing his contacts and can see them clearly. He doesn’t have a licentious thought in his head. They look like they are about sixteen.

“Tom Cruise!” the mom says. “He looks just like Tom Cruise.”

Daniel sinks to the bottom and meditates with his eyes closed. The more things change, the more they stay the same, he thinks to himself. But everything had changed and nothing will ever be the same. He is where God wants him to be. In three days, he will be throwing a baseball in the backyard with his son. That night they will watch a game and Gremlins. But it starts here. It starts now. In the belly of this whale.