Big Mike: I'll Kiss You On The Strikes And You Kiss Me On The...

Friday was a very special sports anniversary. On March 6th, 1973, New York Yankees pitchers Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich announced to the world that they'd swapped families. Yep, wives, kids, and - as every news report was obliged to mention - even dogs.

How weird were the 1970s? I grew up in the era. As a 17-year-old in 1973, I concluded that sex of every stripe and variety was my birthright. And that wasn't just because my glands were pumping out male hormones like a kegger on St. Patrick's Day but because I'd taken a look around and seen my fellow citizens humping like toy poodles.

I also was a relatively well-read kid so I kept up with every advancement made by one oppressed minority or another. This new era thrilled me. Blacks were slowly but surely gaining rights and opportunities. Women were standing up. Gays and lesbians were peeking out of the closet.

I wanted in on the party so I searched for the ugly brutality that had been keeping me down. I longed to thrust my first in the air and declare death to The Man. Unfortunately, I was a white male growing up in a middle class family in a comfortable bungalow. There wasn't a right or privilege envisioned by Jefferson or Douglas or Freidan or even Abbie Hoffman (my idol - I insisted my friends call me Abbie) that I did not already possess. I was in no position to fight The Man; I was only a couple of years away from becoming The Man.

But I was a clever revolutionary tyro. Why, I'd simply become a member of an oppressed class, like magic! So I pondered who I should become. I had a beard worthy of the Smith Bros. so telling people I was a woman was out. My hair was kinky (my grade school nickname was Nigger Hair) and I became rather dark in the summer but I realized few would believe my ancestors came from the Ivory Coast. Then it hit me.

I'd discovered Woody Allen's movies around that time. He not only talked openly about being a Jew but he elevated Jewishness to an art form. And, yeah, I had the kinky hair. That's it - I'm a Jew!

The fellows at my Roman Catholic high school were immediately skeptical when I adopted a trace of a New York accent and interspersed my conversation with Yiddishisms. One Friday in the lunchroom, my pal Bronson (who'd taken his nickname from the motorcycle-riding drifter in the television show "Then Came Bronson") ran up and told me he'd gotten tickets to see the bands War and Parliament at the old International Amphitheater that night.

"Let's go, Abbie," he gushed. "It's gonna be dynamite!"

"Oy," I moaned. "If only I could. Such a drive! And the noise! You want I should have a headache for the next three days?"

"Abbie," Bronson said firmly, "you're not a Jew."

My face turned red. After a beat, I admitted in a low voice, "I know." Thus ended my flirtation with the tribe of Abraham.

Next, I decided to become gay. Well, not in practice, for god's sake. Only in my public pronouncements. And not fully gay either. My pals and I were sitting on a bench in Amundsen Park, palming a joint, when I blurted an announcement. "I gotta move down by the lake," I said, trying to keep the toke down. "Gotta be around my own kind. I'm bi."

This statement was met with less than rousing enthusiasm. In fact, later that night, Fat Marc, the toughest guy in the neighborhood and heretofore one of my best friends, blackened both my eyes.

Finally I concluded I was sexually oppressed. Heterosexually oppressed, that is. After all, I thought about the subject night and day yet I was no nearer to tasting its pleasures than I was to leaping to the top of the new Standard Oil Building. Society was keeping me down, man! This sick, repressive, puritanical country was denying me my basic right to ecstasy. I was ready to take to the streets.

No matter that I was a gawky, pimply-faced dweeb with moves that would have made Julius Kelp look like George Clooney. That wasn't keeping me chaste. It was The Man.

Even though I had all the zeal of a newly converted revolutionary, I still couldn't get laid. But I talked a great game. I announced that I planned to have sex with as many human beings as possible. I'd do it in beds, on kitchen countertops, in parks, on sunlit hills, in misty forests, in luxury hotels, in confessionals, in the soup aisle, and in the bleachers.

Especially in the bleachers. It would combine the two loves of my life - baseball and sex. I might be assumed into heaven had I the opportunity to display my swordsmanship under a blanket in the sparsely populated centerfield bleachers. Heck, the camera might even catch me at work and Jack Brickhouse might say, enviously, "Now there's a young man who knows what he's doing!"

It was at this time I read about Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich. They and their wives had attended a wife-swapping party one night and gotten into the spirit of things. Next thing they knew, each had fallen in love with the other's mate and vice versa. Soon, the moving vans were on the way.

Sportswriters and other establishment types had apoplexy. The world, they predicted, was about to spin wildly out of its orbit. I loved it. Peterson and Kekich became my favorite baseball players.

They knew how to stick it to The Man.

Big Mike: "Do I Look Like A Liar?"

Tuesday was Trivia night at Dick's Pizza. Skip the Trombonist, my usual teammate, had to substitute for Andy the Trivia-meister, who was busy helping an old pal settle into alcohol rehab. I have a lot of trouble with Skip's questions whenever he fills in but I'm an ace when Andy runs the show. Andy and I must have similar interests. I do know this: we both have copies of the "New York Times Almanac" in the bathroom. Perhaps Skip doesn't read in the bathroom.

Anyway, I was happy to be out from under the sobriquet, Team Gorlock. The name was Skip's idea. He's a devotee of "The Colbert Report." Gorlock, a character on the show, is Stephen Colbert's lawyer.

Since I was playing alone against five other teams, I chose the moniker Frankie Machine in honor of one of Chicago's greatest authors. That was the lead character's name in Nelson Algren's book, "The Man with the Golden Arm."

I quickly found myself firmly ensconced in second place. Here's a sample question: What do Karl Marx, Bob Dylan, and Sonny Liston have in common? (Answer at the end of the post.)

I sat next to a garrulous young couple - a pretty woman and her athletic-looking partner. She'd struck up a conversation with me before the game started, asking about the crossword puzzle I was doing while I waited. She proceeded to tell me her name was Natasha, that she was an accountant, that she'd been born in Guyana, that she was highly ambitious, and that she'd lived in Orlando, Florida until recently.

Natasha asked me what I do. When she learned I'm a writer a lightbulb flashed on over her head. "Do you write biographies?" she asked.

"I'll write anything as long as the money's right."

"Have you ever heard of Dee Brown?"

The name sounded familiar. I remembered that Dee Brown had written "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee," one of the seminal consciousness-raising Native American books of the 1970s. "Yeah," I said, "I think so."

She pointed a thumb at her escort and said, "Here he is."

I recoiled a bit. Dee Brown, I figured, ought to be pushing 100. Natasha noted my puzzlement.

"You know, Dee Brown," she said. "The basketball player. He won the Slam Dunk Contest in 1991."

"Oh yeah," I said, but not too convincingly. The fellow appeared too callow to be even the younger Dee Brown.

A few moments later, I pressed Natasha, "So he's really Dee Brown the basketball player?"

"Of course he is! Why would I lie? Do I look like a liar?"

I don't know what a liar looks like but I do know Dee Brown was a star for the Boston Celtics in the 90s. Natasha introduced me to him with the preamble that I was a fine writer and would like to write a biography of him. I was about to say I'd expressed no such desire when the fellow clasped my hand eagerly and began telling me he was in Louisville to start up a basketball camp for youngsters. "Write a story about me," he said, handing me his card. "Anything you can do will help."

He and Natasha decided to play Trivia. They called themselves Royal Crown. Skip insisted on calling them Royal Clown. During the first round, I moaned out loud about the difficulty of the questions. "They ain't so hard," the fellow said. "I got at least six out of ten."

"Six out of ten! You're shitting me," I blurted. I figured I'd answered only four correctly.

"Damn," he said. "This is easy."

Skip then announced the first round scores. The fellow and Natasha had answered only two correctly. "Aw, man!" the fellow moaned.

When the game was over, I'd finished in second place while Royal Crown was second to last. Still, the fellow pranced around the room high-fiving people.

And then, like that, the couple left. Someone told Jason the Bartender that the fellow was Dee Brown. Jason, a basketball fanatic, tilted his head. "Yeah?' he said. "Didn't look like him."

My mind immediately flashed to a story I'd read in the papers last fall. A New Jersey man was arrested after spending the summer telling people he was the New York Yankees pitcher Joba Chamberlain. Apparently, his summer was packed with free drinks and food and more sex than he'd ever had before. The man was charged with criminal simulation and theft of services.

I fingered this Dee Brown fellow's card. Could he be the real thing? I'll let you know in a future post.

(Trivia answer: all three appeared on the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album cover.)

Big Mike: Flipping Pizzas Or Flipping Out?

I'd only disclosed this secret to two people: Skip, the trombonist, and Andy, who has a PhD in microbiology and immunology and serves venti lattes at the Starbucks in the Kroger on Westport Road.

Now I'm putting it out there: I've been harboring a desire to work in the kitchen at the pizza joint a half mile down on Goose Creek Road.

Since The Loved One quit her job in November (the job, by the way, that we moved to Louisville for) we've had to tighten our belts here at Chez Studs. Actually, I couldn't be happier that TLO quit - the job was tearing her apart, making her miserable. The change in her has been remarkable - yet another reason why I'll always tell people, If you hate what you're doing, stop doing it now.

Anyway, I need to generate a bit more moolah so our retirement account doesn't drop into the double digits. I play Trivia at this pizza joint every Tuesday night as part of Team Gorlock. Skip and I are the core of the team with three or four other guys occasionally floating in and out. Andy is the emcee for the game; he draws up the questions and then battles the sound system trying to announce them.

Team Gorlock is the reigning champ. You might call us the New York Yankees of Trivia. We lost to the Thrashers a few weeks ago and there was stunned silence when the final score was announced. Then the Thrashers erupted in a noisy celebration worthy of yesterday's inauguration. Since then, we've regained our rightful place at the top.

This pizza joint is pretty much run by members of the species, Pan Troglodytes. If your order comes out correctly, consider yourself fortunate. And trying to get a drink at the bar, no matter how light the business, is like extracting your own wisdom tooth. That's why I won't reveal the real name of the place. Let's call it Dick's Pizza.

So, considering that I need a part-time job and considering that TLO will be spending every work week (with our only car) in Bloomington starting in ten days, it occurred to me that I ought to apply for a job at Dick's. It's a healthy walk away and, jeez, the place needs someone with a brain (that would be me.)

I really learned how to make pizzas when I was the In-Store Educator at Whole Foods Market in Evanston. The boys in deli showed me how to do it quickly and uniformly. They even taught me how to spin the dough high in the air. I'd been making pizzas at home for years but the project would take about ten hours, resulting in one or two pies. Now I know how to churn them out.

I figured, hell, Dick's is always looking for kitchen help so I'll give it a shot. It ain't a glamorous position but so what? I'd make slightly less than a panhandler but, again, so what?

For the last three weeks I've been trying to corral the manager to ask him if he might consider hiring me. Sadly, this manager (let's call him Otis) has been barred from hanging out at the place during his off-hours because he's caused a riot or two after enjoying some after-work refreshments and now when he's on duty he makes himself so scarce even the other employees can't locate him. Hmm.

Then, last night before Trivia, I found out the owner of the place was prowling around. I'd never seen her before. She owns several other locations around Louisville and rarely visits this one. Skip pointed her out to me. Let's call her Leona.

Aha, I thought. Screw Otis. I'll go right to the top and lean on Leona for a job. We had about 15 minutes to go before the game so I got up to walk toward the bar where Leona was pacing back and forth like a caged leopard. Before I took two steps, Leona unleashed a roar.

"God damn it!" she hollered. "Can't I get anybody around here who wants to work? Doesn't anybody care? These fuckers! You gotta take ownership, you gotta care about your job. You can't just come in here and do the minimum. If something needs to be done, do it! What the hell am I gonna do around here? Fuckin' assholes." She took a swig from a bottle of beer and came around the bar to sit on a stool. I'd frozen in my tracks.

Leona looked around at all the stunned customers' faces. "I mean it!" she yelled. "This is shit. I'm tired of this!" She'd worked herself up so much she had to pat the sweat off her forehead with a bar napkin. She took another swig. "Honest to god, the people around here aren't worth a dime. Idiots." She went on in this vein for endless minutes.

Finally, after it appeared she was calming down, Skip tried to break the tension with humor, suggesting, "Why don't you pay 'em more?"

Wrong tactic. Leona started in again. "Fuck that!" she exploded. "I pay 'em too much as it is. If I paid 'em what they're worth, they'd owe me money!" This went on for more endless minutes. Skip looked around, sheepish, and shrugged.

By now, the Trivia game was due to begin. Andy wrestled with his microphone and the PA system as usual. Leona picked up her beer and, sans jacket, stomped out of the place. Andy was at the top of his game. Here are some of his questions:

• Food & Beverage - what product is the company Perugina noted for?
• US Presidents - who was the first president born in a state other than the original 13 colonies?
• Music - which pop singer is known by the nickname, the Duchess?
• The Periodic Table - which element is represented by the symbol Hf?
  

Skip and I labored. The game goes on for three rounds, ten questions each. For each round, you rank your answers on a 1-10 scale, giving the answer you have the most confidence in 10 points and the least, one. So the maximum number of points you can earn in a round is 55 - 165 for the whole game. Team Gorlock, I'm happy to say, finished with a total of 141 points to remain the champs. Our victory was greeted by chants of Gorlock sucks, Gorlock sucks. My chest swelled with pride.

The answers, I should add, to the aforementioned questions are: chocolate, Lincoln, Fergie of the Black-Eyed Peas, and hafnium. Of these four, Skip and I missed only chocolate.

Oh, I've dropped the idea of asking for a job at Dick's. It wouldn't be a glamorous position and I'd probably make more money panhandling.