The last summer I spent in Chicago was an exhilerating season of baseball. The Chicago Cubs had a great record for the first time in the millenium and the talk of the town was that they might play the Boston Red Sox in the World Series. I was living Northwest of the city with my friend Luis and his girlfriend Katie in a tiny apartment on the cusp of Humboldt Park, working as a dishwasher at a hotel. Tragedy fell on my head as I learned that my mom had passed away, and I knew that I would have to leave the city of Chicago. I made plans to move to Boston, because I had people there willing to set me up. The week after the funeral I made a trip up to Boston to lay down those plans, and while visiting I bought a yellow Red Sox hat. That hat stayed on my head as I finished my last two months of dishwashing at the hotel, so that everyone in the building would know where I was headed.
At the end of the summer, I arrived at South Station with my mountains of records and the yellow Red Sox hat on my head. I got off the train and into my sisters car, and as we took off into the ancient, winding streets of this coastal city, I whipped the hat off my head and threw it out the windy window, giving it back to the Boston nights. It was a spiritual move, and a practical one. Spiritual in that the energy of the hat had belonged to me in my last times living in Chi, but now back on the East Coast that energy must be given back to its proper owner, the city of Boston. Practical in that I didn’t want to look like every other schlub in the city of a million Red Sox hat wearing schlubs. I told my Bostonian buddy Ro, who is huge into baseball (although a noob compared to his sports-writing brother), that the Red Sox would win the World Series. I could feel it coming, as that yellow hat had come, across the plains of Pennsylvania on a train in the night of America, a train named destiny.
The Cubs and the Red Sox both advanced to the post season that fall. The Cubs played the Marlins and lost the series, 4-3. The Red Sox faced off against the Yankees. Game 7 found me working in a new hotel, now as a busboy. I was bussing a private party in one of the private dining rooms. They had a television brought in as the game went to extra innings. The service in the room ended, the servers went home, but the customers refused to leave. They didn’t want to chance missing Destiny. As a busboy I was left behind to wait for the customers to leave, so that I could finish cleaning the room. It got later and later. The Red Sox lost on a homerun in the eleventh inning. Like the Cubs, they lost the series 4-3. The hotel gave me a cab voucher to get home, because the trains had stopped running to Cambridge. I didn’t just jump into the cab on my exit, though. That night I walked the streets of Boston a bit, amidst public sadness & abandoned signboards that said, “This is the year,” and “Cowboy Up.”
One year later the cities of New York and Boston got into the same series, and New York ramped up 3 straight initial wins. But then the Man Upstairs, aka Big Papi, got to the plate in Game 4, with Destiny on the line, and crushed a homerun. That opened the can, the Ark of the Covenant, and Pandora’s spirits came out of the mouths of every fan of baseball, magnetized to the skin of the boys from Boston. The potential energy was converted, the corner was turned. The Red Sox won the next four games and the World Series, and my prophecy was fulfilled.
I mention all this because of the current strange similarity to the Boston Red Sox and my spiritual life. The Red Sox are in first place with the Yankees hot on their trail, and are in the midst of playing 30 games in 30 days. They have not had a day off since August 22. I am on a similar journey, working 2 full time jobs with exhaustion and defeat hot on my trail. We are both holding on until our opportunity arrives. The city of Boston and this restaurant professional are running parallel processes, and there is plenty of heat and energy about. Every day is hustle time, one more mountain to climb, hard work around the corner. But I believe in the country of me and the Red Sox, and faith is a strong wind on the back. Anyway…
I set up the Scrod Hut with the help of one busboy Saturday morning, basically by myself to do the server side work. We turned that corner and headed into the evening. Last night I served dinner at the Scrod Hut while Manny Ramirez was smashing a game-winner over the Green Monster. I love serving people because its such a tight human connection, and I do enjoy pleasing people. Almost nothing is as pleasurable as a good meal. Dinner service is a strange beast because there is so much time for server/served interaction, compared to lunch, due to the amount of time spent at the table. But sometimes the customers just wants to be left alone, so its important to be sensitive to bright-line boundaries. I hit it off with a table of nine wonderful women and they paid with a wad, and Manny Ramirez hit that homerun with such a sweet swing.
I don’t have any days off either, and so I draw energy from mythical mystical metaphorically mindful manifestions of faith.
Friday night E and 3rdarm (uhh…me) spun records live on the 3rdarm server. We didn’t get more than a handful of listeners because there was no heads-up, and a lot of people spend Friday night away from the computer. Next time there will be a heads up, until then, keep your head up.
Have you seen the Revolution controller? I’d love to play me some Quake 2 ctf in “nanchaku mode.”