ICYMI, Part X
an excerpt from Mister Joe's Pirates
by Karl Koweski
3.
Milsap walked into little league practice like a rock star. As much of a rock star as you can look walking the length of Dearborn Avenue from 45th street to the dugout clear on the other end of the Hermit’s Park baseball complex with the June sun blazing down like the devil’s spotlight.
Milsap wore the tightest, more impractical jeans I’d ever seen outside Candy Mae’s strip joint. The jeans were distressed, tattered, ripped with razor blade cuts squirting strands of cotton fibers descending from his crotch to the cuffs bunched atop his cheap Pony high-tops. He wore a Def Leppard T-shirt featuring a cartoonish Joe Eliot astride a skateboard. The arms of Milsap’s shirt was cut out for reasons I could not fathom. Fucking kid possessed the muscle tone of a rake handle.
Completing his look, he wore wraparound sunglasses. He kept his ballcap secured to his belt loop so everyone could get a good look at his freshly fashioned mullet.
So help me God, it took the little jackass fifteen minutes to walk the length of the city block, and we watched him and catcalled him the entire way. With his mitt hanging off the barrel of his bat, he looked like what you’d have if Ryne Sandberg and Ozzy Osbourne had a carpet-bagging baby who’d narrowly survived a bear mauling.
“Sweet Jesus,” I said, once he entered the dogrun-sized dugout. “Economou could have crawled here faster.”
Milsap was going to act like he was too cool to hear a fucking word I said.
“Hey, I’m talking to you, fancy pants. Is that an earring sticking outta your head? What the hell happened to you?”
Milsap tilted his head at me as though he were studying a three-armed spider monkey. “The world, baby doll. The world happened to me.”
“Baby doll? Get the fuck outta here with shit. The world. You wouldn’t know the bullshit of the world if it slapped you across the face with an air guitar. You’re on first base since it don’t look like your boyfriend, Skiba, is coming back any time soon. Goddammit.”
Milsap took his time hanging his bat on the fence. He donned his glove and punched the pocket a couple times as though he were a real ballplayer, then slowly swaggered toward the first base side of the diamond.
I looked at Pete. He grinned at me, not because he thought Milsap looked like a fruit loop, but because his face didn’t know what else to do with itself.
“You believe this shit?” I asked. “Wobbly O… where the hell you think you’re going?
Wobbly O stopped halfway toward the pitcher’s mound. “First base?”
“Why the hell? I need you over here on third base like every other fucking… Has everyone lost their goddam minds?”
“It’s the Def Leppard,” Brian’s little brother spoke.
“What?”
I tried to remember the kid’s name, but nothing would come to me.
“Actually, he’s dressing like Def Leppard,” the kid continued talking as though he were lecturing me about pop culture so cutting edge, I couldn’t possibly have any hope of comprehending what the hell he was talking about. “He’s dressing like Joe Eliot from the Def Leppard ‘Pour Some Sugar on Me’ video on the MTV. It’s off their latest album ‘Hysteria.’ They got a one-armed drummer.”
“Listen, kid, you ain’t telling me anything I don’t already know. I’ve been listening to that shit since ‘On Through the Night’ back when their one-armed drummer was a two-armed drummer. I saw Def Leppard open for Styx at the Fair Grounds back in the day. You know what I’m saying? They were so green I could have jumped on stage and joined the band if I cared enough to learn how to play an instrument. That’s how far back I go. And as far as ‘Pour Some Sugar on Me’ goes, MTV can suck a dick. I gotta hear that fucking song ten times every time I step foot in a titty flop. What I’m wanting to know is why Milsap feels the need to dress up like a jackass for baseball practice.”
“It’s what Joe Eliot wore in the new Def Leppard video for ‘Pour Some Sugar on Me.’”
“I understand that. Goddammit.”
I turned to Pete leaned against the Chain-link fence beside me. “These fucking kids keep talking at me like they’re trying to explain jet propulsion to the goddam Amish.”
Pete shrugged. “You’re just out of touch, Baby doll.”
“I don’t accept that. I’d still be fucking eighteen-year-olds if Mister Joe’s didn’t card every half ass decent looking girl who walked through the door. Hey, Economou! Lucas!”
Add comment