Gps, p.12
Gps, page 12
It occurred to Jeff after the first hour or so of normal, uninterrupted GPS behavior that if he could not force himself to just be honest with Riley about everything — “Can we please just talk about this?” — then he truly had become a worthless, pathetic soul. The unexplained happened every day in some manner or another, so why should he not be honest about it? What was there to lie about? What did he have to lose? Not his marriage, not anymore, so why not just blurt it all out?
When Ascondo finally got the call from that dickhead Reno in the sixth inning, he’d undoubtedly had plenty of time to daydream the at-bat hundreds of different ways, from ninth-inning grand slam to sixth-inning strikeout. Of all the things he knew when he dug in at home plate, the one thing he did not know was what result his at-bat would produce. No one but Ascondo and Jeff knew of or cared about his dream of playing in New York. Maybe striking out would have been the right thing to do, but he had no way of knowing. He just let it fly. Without thought of consequence, Ascondo went up there and delivered.
As Jeff drove on through the night, he tried to imagine Ascondo being introduced at Shea as Felix himself had dreamed it a million times.
Then Jeff tried to imagine his parallel dream, his own Shea Stadium moment. But he couldn’t because there wasn’t one. He felt as though Ascondo had served as some sort of inspiration, and Jeff felt truly inspired to be inspired. About what he had no idea.
He plowed onto I-10 lost in thought, the Celica windows rolled down in attempt to keep himself awake and refreshed. What in the world had that counter on the screen been? That question lingered for hundreds of miles more, as Jeff inched his way across the land monitored ever so closely by the GPS and the woman’s relentless reminders about exits and his proximity to them. It was nearly eight hours later, after Jeff had re-entered the state of Louisiana and had begun to think again about what would happen with Ascondo, that she, the GPS, talked out of turn.
“In, 14, days, begin training.”
Then nothing else until Jeff was beckoned to take Exit 236-A to Esplanade Avenue. As he steered onto the ramp and back down into the arms of the Crescent City, Jeff’s face was again crumpled into a confused frown. He had not yet gotten over the shock of the GPS’s most recent strange behavior and was now rifling through his brain trying to organize every shred of memory of that night in New Mexico. Again.
There had to be one thing he could tie to another, something that could explain what had happened, what was still happening. He had to sit down and lay out the evidence, be honest with himself and determine what was real and what wasn’t. But wouldn’t there have to be a third list for the stuff in between fact and fiction, like a third pile of laundry oddities that has to be washed separately? Of course there would. There would be a big stack of stuff in between the real and the fantasy that Jeff simply could not rule on himself. The arbiter he immediately thought of, the only one he would have considered asking to make a ruling on the pile of unknowns, unfortunately, was likely a little too familiar with the person involved in the incident to make an unbiased decision.
One way or another, he had to talk to Riley and he planned to. Instead of outright honesty, though, it would be vague, his explanation. It would be nothing more than a description, as best as he could muster, of what he had seen play out in his car that day, and also in his frantic dream in Florida which he’d long since realized would not simply vanish from his memory like most dreams did.
In fact, that dream had felt like a half-hour drama that might just pick up and continue in a week or so. Maybe sooner. But it was also like picking up a half-hour drama in midseason and trying to figure out who was who, what had happened before that and whether or not what happened next would make any sense. None of it made sense to Jeff now, as for the first time in his life he thought ahead to that night’s sleep with a feeling of trepidation.
In a time when in most places in America spring was still arriving with its comfortable breezes and peeking green buds, the summer heat was already on full blast in New Orleans. The orange glow of the Esplanade street lamps already had that foggy, damp tint that never left town for long. The red Celica slowed to a squeaking stop — it was feeling a lot worse physically than the man riding inside, only the man inside hadn’t thought about that yet — and its lights blinked out immediately. As tired as he was, Jeff was feeling the discomfort of a man who feared the things that might haunt his slumber, things he could not control or make go away.
“Warren — we know where you're goin’” sounded more like a warning now than a comforting thought as he pulled the ever-hot GPS off the windshield and extracted the rest of his travel gear from the car.
Lefty was certainly happy to see him. He was sitting halfway down the steps when Jeff wrestled himself through the door. But the cat didn’t follow him into the bedroom and dive headlong onto the bed to inspect all of the smells of the outside world like he usually did. Instead, he took a quick detour at the bedroom doorway, veering off into the bathroom to his left, looking back and meowing uneasily as Jeff clumsily threw his bags onto the mattress with a bounce and then did the same with his body.
With painstaking, incremental movements, the cat wormed its way into the bedroom minutes later, walking along the room’s far outer edge, away from the closet, while Jeff reclined, staring straight up at the ceiling. The man on the bed was thinking he didn’t care to travel anywhere for a couple of days, or maybe weeks. He didn’t want to think about baseball. If he could just wait out the return of the Zephyrs, he might be able to make that happen ...
Lefty was suddenly in his face, making his heart jump as the cat leapt silently, unexpectedly onto the bed and began cramming its big black head into Jeff’s chest and purring. Soon, the man fell asleep between his unpacked bags, still wearing his clothes and with his feet still touching the floor while the cat — usually good for at least 22 hours of shuteye a day — spent the night like it had the last 24 hours, gazing suspiciously down at the clothes hamper, which still emitted that dangerous aroma.
Jeff slept through what little was left of the night, through the morning, into the early afternoon and through any terror that might have been lurking within. The new day brought an unexpected sense of hope for him, at least until he plunked the Tuesday Times-Picayune onto the table. At the same moment, he waited for his cell phone to reveal who might have left him a message at 7:58 that morning.
“Felix Ascondo — movin’ out,” was all Sandy’s voice said on Jeff’s phone. It knocked him right off his feet and into his chair, perhaps more numb than stunned. There wasn’t much more detail in the Associated Press transactions in that morning’s paper, but it was there: “New York Mets trade RHP Tanner Grace and OF Felix Ascondo to Texas for IF Tyler Mack and future considerations.”
- 17 -
Old, bad habits usually don’t just vanish into thin air.
They attach themselves to things over time, like parasites, so they can just hang on for the ride like bums in boxcars. They camouflage themselves against their hosts and just become an inseparable part of them, shadowing them everywhere they go in life.
Since Jeff was in no position to drink any toasts in honor of Felix Ascondo — or maybe toasts denouncing the Mets for trading him — Monday night in St. Lucie, he decided to drink one toast, and then another, and then another to the outfielder on Tuesday afternoon, alone in his living room. He couldn’t decide if Ascondo’s trade to Texas marked success or failure for Jeff in the eyes of the Mets organization, but rightly feared it was the latter, and that was worth a few toasts as well.
The non-stop afternoon sun poured into the room from the city outside, and Jeff had spontaneously broken the seal on a bottle of Bushmills 21-year old. He’d been sent the bottle by the same college roommate that first turned him on to Irish whiskey and explained to Jeff its important history to both their families in some drawn-out drunken story. It was an unexpected Christmas gift a few years back not long after Glenn McHale had tracked him down online. They didn’t see much of one another, but not because Glenn hadn’t tried.
The longer something sat on a shelf, allegedly, the more it was worth. That certainly held true for the many premium strains of alcohol. But Jeff figured whiskey in the bottle was whiskey failing to serve its purpose. It had been a few good days away from the juice, sure, but there was no way he was going cold turkey from here. Not yet.
Draining that first glass of the 21 was like a black tar heroin junkie laying off the needle for a few days and then shooting a bag of China White. Jeff happily began parading around the room for no real reason other than his blood had begun to flow with that extra drive that meant he was feeling the booze already. As if to embody the notion he had no real identity of his own anymore, Jeff found himself copying Ascondo’s rendition of shadow ball, taking imaginary swings in the air. His swings weren’t worth a thing, sadly, but Jeff didn’t care at the moment. The rush of alcohol made him feel alive again.
His cat stood at a safe distance in the hallway as Jeff had quickly poured that second glass, this one another toast to Felix with a few swigs thrown in for old Glenn, one of many who had unsuccessfully tried to remain friends with Jeff in the long term. As his mind began to shift gears rapidly with the thoughts of a drunk in the very beginning stages of a long night, he promptly decided he was going to spend the remaining hours of daylight out in the courtyard. All he needed was the broom and the big roll of trash bags. And the bottle, and the glass. And the radio, and the cat. Perfect.
Although the day was moving along quickly, Jeff made remarkable progress as the 21-year old booze soaked steadily into his bloodstream and his brain. The impromptu renovation project he was embarking on took him back immediately to that long winter in the wake of Katrina, sweeping and hauling all those remains of people’s lives into giant piles at the end of every street, piles which the government still hadn’t bothered to help the city get moved in many places.
At times that afternoon and evening, Jeff felt like an archaeologist, examining big chunks of the nearly six-inch thick layer of debris on the courtyard floor. He’d grabbed a rusty spade off the back porch of the adjacent, long-vacant house that overlooked the courtyard across the alley, and had begun to shovel big squares of the stuff into trash bags.
The whiskey had put a stumble into Jeff’s step by the time the sun disappeared behind the houses, but nonetheless the courtyard’s stone floor was slowly being revealed like the bottom of a cake pan as its contents are consumed. For a while, Jeff broke open each square of crust to see what might be found within. It was easy for him to identify the tier of debris that Katrina had contributed to the layers of crust. It was the wide, compact layer that in his limited searching revealed an almost completely bleached and brittled dollar bill, the leg bone of a dog or nutria and a guitar pick.
Even as the shadows of night began to blanket the courtyard, Jeff pressed on. He intended to finish the task at hand and haul every bag of debris to the dumpster in the alley across the street before he was done.
In the morning, he planned on finishing the job with the broom which had seen no action that day. It really would look nice once the stones had a chance to breath again and reveal the character of the ornate fountain in the center. He even planned to buy a new table and chairs, just like the ones he’d pictured all those days he gazed out here from the window. The cat he’d hoped to have as a companion was the one gazing down from the window on that day. Like the broom, Jeff had decided Lefty wouldn’t have much purpose or much pleasure until he had at least dug the courtyard out of its years of neglect.
By 10:30, Jeff was out of the shower and peering drunkenly down at the darkened courtyard, thinking how great gas lanterns would look down there and, of course, how great Riley would look down there. He figured if he played his cards right, he could have her there in a matter of days, and now knew this had to be the meeting place. Riley had only set foot in Jeff’s post-marriage home to feed the cat and deliver notes, and he planned to change that at once, if only once.
The drunken stupor he now approached was one of the hopeful ones, not one of the defeatist ones that had become more common for him. He hoped there would be no blackout at the end of this one, but wasn’t promising himself anything. In a rare moment of true drunken wisdom, Jeff ambled over to the table, snatched his phone off of it and thumbed the power button until it shut off. He hoped that would prevent any drunk dialing, but he carried the phone into the kitchen and put it in his silverware drawer as further precaution. This was no time to call Riley and he was thankful he’d realized it.
Instead, he spent his last waking hour on the business end of one last glass — the last glass available as it were — of the 21-year old whiskey. His 10-year old cat was on the couch next to him, wishing it could trade places with Jeff’s laptop. The man beneath the computer had fished out his ‘Muck the Fets’ T-shirt which he’d had since he was 16. He put it on to signify how he felt about his current employer and its trading of Felix Ascondo. He hoped the Dominican got the chance to avenge his broken dream someday.
Among the thousands of thoughts and ideas that washed in and out of his brain that day, one that came back to him a second time as he’d showered a day’s worth of New Orleans heat and grime off his body was that he wanted to find out more about the good folks at Warren, the GPS manufacturer. Jeff quickly learned that Warren had a typically underwhelming Web page and one which oddly hadn’t been updated for some time. The home page still carried a banner at the top which said “2007 Christmas Navigation Sale,” and was disappointingly nondescript. Under the header that read NEW FOR 2008, Jeff found just one line of text that read, “New models in stock soon.”
He went back to his search page and clicked on a link to a site called techjunkies.com, and found it was some sort of message board for discussing all things gadgetry. His search for Warren Sat-Nav GPS had steered him into a thread about the company’s products. Like any annoying message board about anything, there were long lines of drivel about this or that which could be applied to any product, any hotel or any restaurant. Some loved their 8-inch screens and some hated them. Some said it was the best GPS ever and some wouldn’t be giving Warren any more of their money. Typical. Masses of misspelled words and incomplete sentences. He scrolled further, reading posts completely at random.
“We used our bran new Warron GPS last spring, and it was the perfect guide for a vacation through Napa Valley! If only that nice women inside the speeker would of told me about Pino Gregio, our trip would of been perfect,” Ann from Nebraska, clearly an academic, had felt compelled to tell techjunkies.com.
Another one: “This was my third GPS, as I am a regional sales representative in greater Chicago. I found the Warren model slow and dysfunctional! Numerous times, it failed to store valuable previous client trips I’d made, forcing me to constantly reprogram all the addresses. It also put a damper on a first date when it took me to a restaurant in Downers Grove that was no longer there! I think I’ll fly from now on!” — Ed from Chicago.
“Nice having you, Eddie. Now piss off to the airport with the rest of the puppets,” Jeff said in a triumphant-sounding voice, deciding once again the fascination of the Internet had managed to elude him.
In one final sweep up to the top of the first page, Jeff happened upon something odd. At the top were the most recent postings, all of which referred to a sudden, unannounced halt in customer service with the Warren Web site and corresponding contact phone numbers. No answer on the phone, apparently, and no returned emails regarding anything from repairs to refunds to next year’s line. Had the company gone under just like that? There was a growing list of complaints on the matter, including a few posted in the last couple of weeks.
“I am still waiting to here from those ideits about where I send my busted GPS, which stopped working after dropping it on the ground only once! ... Anyone know a contact with Warren? Their websight page seems to be stuck in concreat!!!! Can someone out there help?? I wanted to buy my daughter a GPS like mine for her graduation, but I can’t find any up to date products or anything else about Warren thats up to date!!! Help!!!”
People loved exclamation points, and Jeff loved them because they were a perfect annoyance test for people. Some people were the run-of-the-mill exclamation point addicts, the ones who likely read too many of the strange Mark Trail newspaper comics as kids and simply thought periods and exclamation marks were interchangeable — “The grizzly bear can mark up to eight miles of terrain in one day! The desert camel can store gallons of water in each hump! Rabbits live in complex communities called warrens!”
More annoying were the people who thought two exclamation points were best (OMG!!), and of course, there was no limit to either of them — how many exclamation points one might be compelled to use or how annoying people might be compelled to be.
With the news about the Warren company apparently being missing in action, Jeff decided to wade through all of the nonsense and read everything in the two-page thread, newest to oldest. Not long after he began to skim instead of read most of the crap and misspelled complaining on page one and then into page two, Jeff’s eyes met a familiar sight. It was a one-sentence post, a small set of words that gave Jeff a jolt of butterflies in his stomach and reminded him that the place he kept trying to write off as fantasy was actually quite real, at least in some way. The one-liner was the fifth reply on page two, and it sent Jeff at once off to bed with an uneasy feeling for the second straight night.
He’d now seen the very same sentence printed neatly on a flyer from that place, had photographed it scrawled next to a gas station toilet in New Mexico, had heard a man in a frantic desert dream call it out to him and now, now he was reading it on a message board, an Internet trailer park if ever there was one. Fittingly, it carried its usual exclamation point behind it.
“Unete a la Revolucion!”
