Big Mike: The Kidney Stone Kids

I've been chewing my fingernails for the last hour and a half. Jeez, I'd better watch out or I'll draw blood. I'm tense, edgy. The guy driving the black BMW in front of me is going about 12 miles an hour, leaning over and checking addresses. I honk. He turns around and flips me the digit. I pull around him to pass and yell, "Get the hell outta my way!"

As I pass, I see him shouting a response. Most of the words begin with an F.

I'm back in Chicago.

The reason for all my nail-chewing and overall angst is the city's unbearable traffic. I've been in Louisville more than two years now and people down there consider five cars stopped at a red light to be a traffic jam. I don't know how I survived 50 years in Chicago with my sanity intact.

I'm heading over to Benny Jay's estate, hard by Lincoln Square, a hop, skip and a jump from Wrigley Field. How long has it been since I laid eyes on my literary colleague and business partner? It becomes obvious the first time we see each other as Benny answers the door. He shushes the dog and wrestles with the front door lock. My technologically challenged old pal. He's stuck - the lock has baffled him. He literally has to run out the back door, around the house via the gangway, and out to the front to greet me.

We seem to freeze for an almost imperceptible moment, assessing each other after we hug. There's a hell of a lot more gray on both our heads, some three or four more belt notches around my waist, and -believe it or not - a good decade of living separating this moment from the last time we saw each other.

"Honestly," Benny asks, "how long has it been?

I ponder a moment. Then it hits me. I remember that memorable early October evening when we watched the festivities on TV in the Irving Park Road bowling alley after Rod "The Shooter" Beck had snuffed out Dusty Baker's San Francisco Giants, vaulting the Sammy Sosa Cubs into the 1998 playoffs. As Sammy himself body-surfed over thousands of delirious bleacherites, some now-forgotten glamorous TV reporter shoved her microphone into the faces of blotto revelers and asked, "How do you feel?"

Some nameless bowling alley employee turned to Benny and me and shouted, as if it were he she was pumping for a sound bite, "Nice tits, bitch!"

Benny and I doubled over in laughter even though we we're both smart enough to be disgusted by his ridiculous, benighted, antediluvian outlook toward women. Why? Who knows? Maybe we were giddy over the Cubs' rare success. Maybe we felt we were suddenly 12 again, giggling over some classmate's use of dirty words.

Whatever. I'm sure we'd seen each other since then but that episode will do for now.

Benny shows me a recent picture of his daughters, who, if I recall correctly, had spaghetti sauce and jelly stains, respectively, on their T-shirts the last time I saw them. They are now grown women. Ouch! What does that make me? The living dead?

Milo calls. "Glab's here!" Benny shouts into the phone. "He's in town! He just dropped in!" And, like that, Milo hops into his car to join us.

Handshakes and hugs abound. Three old goats stand around staring at the ravages of time on each other in Benny's cramped office garret. Before we know it, we settle down to discuss the things that really matter to such venerable figures.

"My doctor says I'm doing good," Milo says. "Blood pressure's good. My weight's good." (At which point I think, The bastard.) "All in all, not bad for a geezer."

I congratulate him on his good fortune.

"But, he did say my kidneys are a little iffy," Milo adds.

Uh oh.

"Yeah, I had kidney stones and they left some scarring."

At this very moment, Benny lopes up the stairs. He'd been downstairs taking a phone call.

"Whaddya guys talkin' about?" he says with the air of a 12-year-old expecting to jump into a chat about the Cubs or the Bulls or the Monkees.

We ain't 12 anymore. Kidney stones, we inform him.

"Oh yeah, I had 'em," Benny crows, almost like a 12 year-old bragging that he's kissed a girl. "I never felt such pain! I remember, it was 2003. I was coaching my daughter's baseball team. It hurt so bad I was nauseated. After the game, I was walking home through River Park and I had to stop to throw up. One of the kids was passing by as I'm bent over and I'm thinking, 'Oh great! What's this kid gonna tell her parents?'"

Milo and I agree that the kid'll probably grow up to be an eminent blogger. One of her posts will be about the time she saw her drunken old baseball coach puking his guts up in the park after a game.

We laugh. Deep, basso, raspy laughs. Milo coughs a bit. I try to catch my breath. Benny says, smiling sagely, "Ah, these kids!"

It's good to be home.

Letter From Milo: A Boy Named Who?

(posted Wednesday, February 18, 2009)

I once knew a boy named Sue. He was an Asian kid who went to my high school. His actual name was Soo, but I'm proceeding phonetically here.

There were a lot of funny names in my school. Many of the students were immigrants or children of immigrants, whose names consisted of odd combinations of consonents and vowels, strung together in ways that the Anglo-Saxon mind had trouble deciphering. I don't have a copy of my high school yearbook but, if memory serves, the roster of students' names would have baffled a Harvard linguist. I doubt if William Safire could pronounce half of the names correctly.

My name, Milo Samardzija, was near the top of the list of tongue-twisting appellations. It wasn't the worst, by any means, but it was close. There was only one teacher that ever got my name right on the first try and that was because she was descended from the same part of the Balkans that my family escaped from. The rest of the school's staff mangled my name for weeks or months before getting it right. One old fart, a drunkard who to tried to teach English, never got it right. He eventually gave up, resorting to saying Hey you or pointing at me when my participation was required.

It was during high school that I grew to hate my name. I envied people with names like Smith, Jones, or Johnson. Wouldn't it be great, I thought, to have a name with only one or two syllables? I had a distant relative in Milwaukee who changed his name from Rade Samardzija to Rudy Summers. I remember asking my dad if he had ever considered changing or shortening our last name. He looked at me like I was crazy and said, "That's a stupid fucking question if I ever heard one."

As bad as I felt about my own name, I felt almost as bad for other students who had unpronounceable or awkward names, like Aphrodite Baffalukis, Predrag Bielopetrovich, Shlomo Finklestein, Scotty Queerman, and George Shitz. We were brothers and sisters united in humiliation, fellow travelers on the road to ridicule. How we got out of high school with our sanity and self-esteem intact is beyond me. In my case, I don't think I did.

Things only got worse when I was drafted into the US Army. If educated high school teachers couldn't pronounce my name then what could I expect from barely literate drill instructors? But, again, I wasn't alone. There were plenty of others in my basic training company with terrible names. I remember one guy in particular, an Armenian, with a name so complicated that it took the combined efforts of two sergeants and a Second Lieutenant to just come close to pronouncing it. In the end, they resorted to calling him Alphabet. The poor kid was so traumatized that he eventually deserted, defecting, I believe, to Huimanguillo, Mexico, Ikaluktutiak, Canada, or somewhere in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

I caught a huge break a couple of years ago when the Chicago Cubs drafted a young pitcher out of Notre Dame named Jeff Samardzija. When he made it to the big leagues last year and radio and TV announcers began broadcasting his name, it changed my life. Suddenly, people began pronuncing my name correctly - on the first try. I was no longer a Hey You, Alphabet, Whatchamacallit, or That Guy. I was a somebody, with a real name, a name that, at least on the North Side, was not so strange after all. It was a life-changing experience, liberating me from the purgatory of the bad-name-afflicted. I hope Jeff Samardzija has a long and successful career with the Cubs and never does anything to dishonor the noble name of Samardzija. After all, if someone with the fine, upstanding name like Bartman can be brought down, it can happen to anybody.

One thing about having an odd name is that it made me appreciate other odd names. In fact, I've become a connoiseur of awkward appellations. I've even compiled a short list of some of my favorite names, in various categories, that I take pleasure in hearing and saying. I'd like to share them with you.

• Politics: Dick Devine
  
• Football: Terdell Middleton
  
• Baseball: Pete LaCock
  
• Exotic Dancing: Ineeda Mann
  
• Statesmen: Zbigniew Bzrezinski
  
• Rock 'n' Roll (tie): Howard Futterman and the Amish Playboys and Skid Marx and the Excrementals

If you, faithful readers, have any favorite odd names, feel free to suggest them in the comment section of this blog. We just might post them someday.